What is the recommended reaction to such a scenario? One drawback of SPF is that it doesn't work when an email has been forwarded. To work around this problem, use SPF with other email authentication methods such as DKIM and DMARC. Email advertisements often include this tag to solicit information from the recipient. Note: MailRoute will automatically recognize that you are using Office 365 for your outbound service, so you do not need to enter an outbound mailserver in the MailRoute Control Panel. Your support helps running this website and I genuinely appreciate it. Received-SPF: Fail (protection.outlook.com: domain of mydomain.com does notdesignate 67.220.184.98 as permitted sender) receiver=protection.outlook.com; i check SPF at mxtoolbox and SPF is correctly configured. The main purpose of SPF is to serve as a solution for two main scenarios: A Spoof mail attacks scenario, in which hostile element abuses our organizational identity, by sending a spoofed E-mail message to external recipients, using our organizational identity (our domain name). You intend to set up DKIM and DMARC (recommended). Even when we get to the production phase, its recommended to choose a less aggressive response. A3: To improve the ability of our mail infrastructure, to recognize the event in which there is a high chance, that the sender spoofs his identity or a scenario in which we cannot verify the sender identity.The other purpose of the SPF is to protect our domain mane reputation by enabling another organization to verify the identity of an E-mail message that was sent by our legitimate users. Each SPF TXT record contains three parts: the declaration that it's an SPF TXT record, the IP addresses that are allowed to send mail from your domain and the external domains that can send on your domain's behalf, and an enforcement rule. SPF is the first line of defense in this and is required by Microsoft when you want to use a custom domain instead of the onmicrosoft.com domain. You don't need to configure this setting in the following environments, because legitimate NDRs are delivered, and backscatter is marked as spam: In standalone EOP environments that protect inbound email to on-premises mailboxes, turning this setting on or off has the following result: More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 1 and plan 2. Most of the time, I dont recommend executing a response such as block and delete E-mail that was classified as spoofing mail because the simple reason is that probably we will never have full certainty that the specific E-mail message is indeed spoofed mail. SPF enables receiving mail servers to authenticate whether an email message was sent from an authorized mail server - but only when the domain owner's SPF record is valid. If you still like to have a custom DNS records to route traffic to services from other providers after the office 365 migration, then create an SPF record for . Edit Default > connection filtering > IP Allow list. Login at admin.microsoft.com, Expand Settings and select Domains Select your custom Domain (not the .onmicrosoft.com domain, Click on the DNS Records tab.If you have bought a license that includes Exchange Online then the required Office 365 SPF record will be shown here, Click on the TXT (SPF) record to open it. This will avoid the rejections taking place by some email servers with strict settings for their SPF checks. If you have anti-spoofing enabled and the SPF record: hard fail (MarkAsSpamSpfRecordHardFail) turned on, you will probably get more false positives. More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 1 and plan 2, Set up SPF in Microsoft 365 to help prevent spoofing, Troubleshooting: Best practices for SPF in Microsoft 365, Example: SPF TXT record for multiple outbound on-premises mail servers and Microsoft 365, Use DKIM to validate outbound email sent from your custom domain in Microsoft 365, Use DMARC to validate email in Microsoft 365, Create DNS records at any DNS hosting provider for Microsoft 365. In Office 365 based environment (Exchange Online and EOP) beside the option of using Exchange rule, we can use an additional option the spam filter policy. Did you know you can try the features in Microsoft 365 Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 for free? You can list multiple outbound mail servers. Received-SPF: Fail ( protection.outlook.com: domain of ourdomain1.com does not designate X .X.X.X as permitted sender) We have SPF for our domain v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all We have also enable that fail SPF email should not get in our admin centre. Q10: Why our mail server doesnt automatically block incoming E-mail that has the value of SPF = Fail? For example, in case that we need to Impose a strict security policy, we will not be willing to take the risk, and in such scenario, we will block the E-mail message, send the E-mail to quarantine or forward the E-mail to a designated person that will need to examine the E-mail and decide if he wants to release the E-mail or not. i check headers and see that spf failed. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. This is the default value, and we recommend that you don't change it. Exchange Online (EOP), include spam filter policy, which contains many security settings that are disabled by default and can be activated manually based on the particular mail security policy that the organization wants to implement. Use the 90-day Defender for Office 365 trial at the Microsoft 365 Defender portal trials hub. One of the options that can be activated is an option named SPF record: hard fail. By default, this option is not activated. Typically, email servers are configured to deliver these messages anyway. We can say that the SPF mechanism is neutral to the results his main responsibility is to execute the SPF sender verification test and to add the results to the E-mail message header. Microsoft maintains a dynamic but non-editable list of words that are associated with potentially offensive messages. However, there is a significant difference between this scenario. For example, if you are hosted entirely in Office 365, that is, you have no on-premises mail servers, your SPF TXT record would include rows 1, 2, and 7 and would look like this: The example above is the most common SPF TXT record. If you've already set up mail for Office 365, then you have already included Microsoft's messaging servers in DNS as an SPF TXT record. If you have any questions, just drop a comment below. If you have a hybrid configuration (some mailboxes in the cloud, and . We cannot be sure if the mail infrastructure of the other side support SPF, and if he implements an SPF sender verification test. This record works for just about everyone, regardless of whether your Microsoft datacenter is located in the United States, or in Europe (including Germany), or in another location. In this phase, we are only capturing event in which the E-mail address of the sender uses the domain name of our organization, and also; the result from the SPF sender verification test is Fail. The E-mail is a legitimate E-mail message. Most of the mail infrastructures will leave this responsibility to us meaning the mail server administrator. We don't recommend that you use this qualifier in your live deployment. The Exchange tool/option that we use for the purpose of gathering information about a particular mail flow event is described as an incident report. The decision regarding the question, how to relate to a scenario in which the SPF results define as None and Fail is not so simple. In case we want to get more information about the event or in case we need to deliver the E-mail message to the destination recipient, we will have the option. In each of the above scenarios, the event in which the SPF sender verification test ended with SPF = Fail result is not good. by The reason could be a problem with the SPF record syntax, a specific mail flow, such as E-mail forwarding that leads to this result, and so on. To do this, change include:spf.protection.outlook.com to include:spf.protection.outlook.de. For example, Exchange Online Protection plus another email system. An SPF record is required for spoofed e-mail prevention and anti-spam control. For example, we are reasonable for configuring SPF record that will represent our domain and includes the information about all the mail server (the Hostname or the IP address) that can send E-mail on behalf of our domain name. However, if you bought Office 365 Germany, part of Microsoft Cloud Germany, you should use the include statement from line 4 instead of line 2. Learning about the characters of Spoof mail attack. To be able to use the SPF option we will need to implement by ourselves the following proceeds: Add to the DNS server that hosts our domain name the required SPF record, and verifies that the syntax of the SPF record is correct + verify that the SPF record includes information about all the entities that send an E-mail message on behalf of our domain name. Not every email that matches the following settings will be marked as spam. The following Mark as spam ASF settings set the SCL of detected messages to 9, which corresponds to a High confidence spam filter verdict and the corresponding action in anti-spam policies. In this category, we can put every event in which a legitimate E-mail message includes the value of SPF = Fail. In order to protect against these, once you have set up SPF, you should also configure DKIM and DMARC for Microsoft 365. A good option could be, implementing the required policy in two phases-. More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 1 and plan 2, You don't know all sources for your email, Advanced Spam Filter (ASF) settings in EOP. For advanced examples, a more detailed discussion about supported SPF syntax, spoofing, troubleshooting, and how Office 365 supports SPF, see How SPF works to prevent spoofing and phishing in Office 365. Authentication-Results: spf=none (sender IP is 118.69.226.171) smtp.mailfrom=kien.ngan; thakrale5.onmicrosoft.com; dkim=none (message not signed) header.d=none;thakrale5.onmicrosoft.com; dmarc=none action=none header.from=thakrale5.onmicrosoft.com; Received-SPF: None (protection.outlook.com: kien.ngan does not designate permitted sender hosts) If you're not sure that you have the complete list of IP addresses, then you should use the ~all (soft fail) qualifier. For example, suppose the user at woodgrovebank.com has set up a forwarding rule to send all email to an outlook.com account: The message originally passes the SPF check at woodgrovebank.com but it fails the SPF check at outlook.com because IP #25 isn't in contoso.com's SPF TXT record. Included in those records is the Office 365 SPF Record. The reason that I prefer the option of Exchange rule is, that the Exchange rule is a very powerful tool that can be used to define a Tailor-made SPF policy that will suit the specific structure and the needs of the organization. We do not recommend disabling anti-spoofing protection. Need help with adding the SPF TXT record? Microsoft believes that the risk of continuing to allow unauthenticated inbound email is higher than the risk of losing legitimate inbound email. The enforcement rule is usually one of these options: Hard fail. Anti-spam message headers includes the syntax and header fields used by Microsoft 365 for SPF checks. Nearly all large email services implement traditional SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks. SPF identifies which mail servers are allowed to send mail on your behalf. It can take a couple of minutes up to 24 hours before the change is applied. Previously, you had to add a different SPF TXT record to your custom domain if you also used SharePoint Online. For more information, see Configure anti-spam policies in EOP. Find out more about the Microsoft MVP Award Program. If you provided a sample message header, we might be able to tell you more. The meaning of the SPF = Fail is that we cannot trust the mail server that sends the E-mail message on behalf of the sender and for this reason, we cannot trust the sender himself. The enforcement rule indicates what the receiving mail system should do with mail sent from a server that isnt listed in the SPF record.