SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros
Here is a complete record: v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 include:_spf.example.com -all That one line authorizes a /24 network and a third party’s servers, then fails everything else. Every rule governing it lives in RFC 7208, the SPF standard published in April 2014. This page is the full reference: every mechanism, every qualifier, both modifiers, the complete macro table, evaluation order, DNS lookup limits, and record placement rules — each with the RFC 7208 section that defines it.
- ▪Here is a complete record: v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 include:_spf.example.com -all That one line authorizes a /24 network and a third party’s servers, then fails everything else.
- ▪Every rule governing it lives in RFC 7208, the SPF standard published in April 2014.
- ▪This page is the full reference: every mechanism, every qualifier, both modifiers, the complete macro table, evaluation order, DNS lookup limits, and record placement rules — each with the RFC 7208 section that defines it.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 1,027 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DMARCguard |
| Canonical URL | https://dmarcguard.io/blog/spf-record-syntax/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:34:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T14:05:40.833Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T14:05:40.833Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | opIjsPLW0ura · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
August 3, 2026 by Meysam Azad spf spf-record-syntax spf-mechanisms spf-macros rfc-7208 dns email-authentication 22 min read Share document.querySelectorAll("[data-copy-url]").forEach(e=>{e.addEventListener("click",async()=>{const t=e.dataset.copyUrl;if(t)try{await navigator.clipboard.writeText(t);const c=e.querySelector(".icon-copy"),l=e.querySelector(".icon-check");c&&l&&(c.style.display="none",l.style.display="block",setTimeout(()=>{c.style.display="block",l.style.display="none"},2e3))}catch{}})}) SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros SPF record syntax follows one shape: a single DNS TXT record that starts with v=spf1, followed by space-separated terms — mechanisms with optional qualifiers, then modifiers — evaluated left to right until the first match.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DMARCguard.
