Customers facing this issue can rest assured that nothing is broken, and our PowerSPF hosted SPF service is working as it should. The issue occurs due to Microsoft’s limitation. This document is directed at aiding our PowerSPF customers to understand technically the use cases where Microsoft O365 might highlight their SPF as invalid on the Microsoft portal.
Problem Statement
When PowerSPF is enabled for your domain, we generate a custom PowerSPF record that won’t display the include mechanism provided by Outlook “include:spf.protection.outlook.com”. Instead, we integrate Outlook’s authorized IP addresses inside the PowerSPF syntax, as shown below:
Due to Microsoft’s limitation, the error message may be displayed in your O365 admin panel for your domain with PowerSPF enabled since they are searching for the exact string syntax rather than checking the authorized IP in PowerSPF. This may result in a false assumption that the SPF record is incorrect when in reality it isn’t.
Troubleshooting this SPF Error
This error message won't impact your email deliverability as the email will pass SPF on the receiving end. This is simply Microsoft’s internal limitation that has no impact on our hosted SPF optimization. Hence, no action needs to be taken to troubleshoot this.
For further assistance, you can contact us to speak to a domain security expert.