When setting up your website, it’s crucial to configure outgoing emails to ensure that communications such as password resets, e-commerce orders, and user account creations are being sent out correctly. These types of emails are termed transactional emails.
SPF record in DNS
Generally, we’d recommend against using our web servers as your main email service provider in a live environment. This is because our servers aren’t set up specifically for handling email sending and receiving.
However, if you’re testing or can live with the possibility of emails going to spam, you can create an SPF record allowing our web server to send emails for you. Even with this setup, emails might still end up in spam. To improve this, you’d need to add DKIM, which External Transactional Email Services can assist with.
An SPF record is a specialized TXT record added to your domain’s DNS. It will tell other mail servers who is allowed to send mail on behalf of your domain. This is an example SPF record:
Name: yourdomain.com
Content/value: v=spf1 a include:bjarne-osl.servebolt.cloud ~all
During testing, it’s recommended to use ~all, which permits emails with a warning if the SPF check fails. Once ready for production, switch to -all to reject emails failing SPF.
Here is an example of how our SPF record can be set up for domain.com in Cloudflare:
External Transactional Email Services
For extensive email requirements, a dedicated transactional email service is advisable for reliable delivery. We recommend several reputable services for this purpose:
If you’re using WordPress, you can also streamline your email setup with plugins like WP Mail SMTP, which facilitates seamless integration with external SMTP providers like Mailgun, Postmark App, Mandrill, SendGrid and SendLayer, ensuring efficient and reliable email delivery for your WordPress site.
