All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Spaces in "unquoted" SPF record may invalidate SPF record
Not sure if this is only problem with some DNS user interfaces or its more general. I thought I had SPF record for years only to find I did not. Well I did have it so it was passing shallow checks, but the syntax of it was ignored.
I noticed gmail marks my emails as SPF neutral despite having SPF record:
v=spf1 a mx -all
Also MX toolbox failed my record, but it was passing fine on http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html
Checked what exactly is DNS returning
nslookup -q=txt mydomain.com
and the result was this:
text = "v=spf1" "a" "mx" "-all"
Those quotes should not be there. Rewrote the SPF record without spaces using the optional + to
v=spf1+a+mx-all
Waited 10-15 minutes and then nslookup returned
text = "v=spf1+a+mx-all"
MX toolbox is happy now, and test email to gmail gains spf-pass.
UPDATE: as TheLinuxBug points out below, turns out we are supposed to place entire SPF record in quotes and then you can use spaces in it.
Comments
@loyd When you set the txt record, you should have it in "" when you enter the content. It looks like when you originally set this you didn't set it in "" so it set each piece of information included as its own object, thus why you saw "v=spf1" "a" "mx" "-all". It sounds like the system you were using interpreted it without quotes but smashed together and then added the quotes for you.
TL;DR:
You need to put "" around anything that is a text record or it will get sliced up like you saw. So the correct record would actually be "v=spf1 +a +mx -all" and it would work just the same.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
That makes sense, good to know. Thank you
I will update the subject
Btw if you are using cloudflare it automatically quotes all txt records.
On another DNS zone manager when using quotes, it changed them to
"Next time I saved, it changed it to"... Some want quotes, some dont.