SPF Softfail vs. Hardfail: A Data-Backed Decision Guide
The article discusses the differences between SPF softfail and hardfail in email authentication. It highlights the conflicting recommendations from major providers like Google and Microsoft regarding which option to choose. The guide provides data-backed insights to help email administrators make informed decisions about their SPF configurations.
- ▪53.6% of SPF-enabled domains use SPF softfail, while 40.2% use hardfail.
- ▪Google recommends using softfail, whereas Microsoft advises against it, suggesting DMARC instead.
- ▪The article includes data from a scan of 5.5 million domains to support its findings.
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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-softfail-vs-hardfail/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 05:27:07 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T05:34:56.099Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T05:34:56.099Z |
| 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 | 82m_zGosh5xd |
| 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
April 13, 2026 (Updated April 26, 2026 ) by DMARCguard Teamspf email-authentication dmarc deliverability dns18 min readShare 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 Softfail vs Hardfail: A Data-Backed Decision Guide53.6% of SPF-enabled domains use SPF softfail (~all). 40.2% use hardfail (-all). Google recommends one. Microsoft recommends the other.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DMARCguard.
