Following on from my previous DMARC|SPF|DKIM article, Recently I’d tried testing my domains email record, Firstly using Valimail’s tools as they are my DMARC reporting tool of choice. After seeing issues here I tried testing using MXtoolbox tools and they provided an unhelpful “SPF Record Null Value” message.
After much Googling, Querying Other domains and comparing SPF records I was lost with where to look next with this issue.
Valimails tools Only advised that my SPF had failed, But didn’t provide any details as to the cause of these issues.
Clicking the link took me to a page advising my SPF Record was the issue, And redirected me to a standard help article. I will note that at the bottom of this article it provided an email address for support which I’m sure would have reached the same conclusion, but I didn’t try.
As I often do this days, I then moved onto Copilot and asked it to look at my records however it was advising that my records were correct and that I shouldn’t be having these issues.
It did however suggest that aswell as MXToolbox tools, It linked me to DMARCian and their rather helpful SPF Checker. It took a while to dig through all their output to get to the actual error message so could be far clearer.
Since getting to the bottom of the issue and sitting down to write this article, I have also found easydmarc.com and their SPF checker also (far more clearly) correctly highlights the issues at hand here.
On searching for my domain:-
So yes, The end result is I had typo’d my SPF record and missed this when comparing with other similar SPF records. Hopefully this article saves someone else some headaches in the future.