Help : Creating a website... : Setting up your domain for our emails

Warning – this information is for your web administrator; usually, Makesweat will ask for management rights to your domain and we’ll be happy to set this up for you.

 

Sending emails on your behalf

Makesweat’s servers will generate various emails for customers; initial login, receipts, booking a class, etc. Your domain’s technical information includes a list of the internet servers permitted to send emails on behalf of your domain; our servers need to be added to this list.

This is done by adding an ‘SPF’ record to your domain. We can help you to do this, or you can do it yourself. Our infrastructure is provided by Mythic Beasts so we use their email gateways for sending.

We publish an SPF record which you can use if your outgoing mail is sent via our mailhubs, at _spf.mythic-beasts.com

You should use the include mechanism to reference this record from your own SPF record. Normally your SPF record will need to go at the root of your domain, which is named as @ in the DNS. So your overall SPF record might look like this:

@    TXT    "v=spf1 include:_spf.mythic-beasts.com -all"

 

Multiple SPF records

Do not duplicate SPF records. If you already have an SPF record in place, such as

v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all

Make sure to just add the new include:, so your record should end up looking like

v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:_spf.mythic-beasts.com -all

 

Warning

Beware that with this record in place, receiving servers are expected to reject mail that purports to come from your domain but is not sent by our mailhubs. You should be sure that this is the case before using this SPF record. Two particular things to think about are websites that may may legitimately send mail using your domain name, and redirections.

 

Further reading

If you need a more complicated SPF record, please feel free to email us for help. The ultimate reference is the SPF standards track RFC.

Note that this record ends with -all, which indicates a fail. If you are publishing an SPF record for the first time, you might prefer to replace -all with ~all which is the less drastic softfail. Unfortunately it can be hard to evaluate the impact of SPF records, since their effect takes place at the receiving end.

Note that you should use a TXT record. There was once an SPF record type, but (for complicated and controversial reasons) this is now deprecated.