Following up on my previous post, How to Fix GoDaddy Blocking Emails from Contact Forms, I recently have been having success with using an SPF text record in the DNS records for a URL to prevent contact form submissions from being blocked by Web hosts, including Go Daddy.
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. Using SPF helps to validate outbound email sent from your custom domain.
In order to use a custom domain to send email, many email systems require that you add a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) TXT record to your DNS record to help prevent spoofing. SPF identifies which mail servers are allowed to send mail on your behalf.
Basically, SPF helps prevent spoofing and phishing. SPF is added as a TXT record that is used by DNS to identify which mail servers can send mail on behalf of your custom domain. Recipient mail systems refer to the SPF TXT record to determine whether a message from your custom domain comes from an authorized messaging server.
Emails coming from a Go Daddy hosted account will generally come from secureserver.net.
The following TXT record should permit email notifications of contact form submissions from Go Daddy hosted websites to make it through most email sytems:
Type: TXT
Name: @
Value: v=spf1 include:secureserver.net -all
TTL: 1 Hour
If an SPF record already exists, you can modify the Value by adding another include statement to it. Below is an example of an SPF record for both Outlook and GoDaddy:
Value: v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:secureserver.net -all
This approach has worked for me on several occasions. Hopefully, you will have success as well.
Hi! I’ve tried adding your TXT record above, but it didn’t seem to work for me. I’m wondering if it has something to do with us using a gmail account rather than a custom email. I noticed some other articles that referenced godaddy/gravity forms and using a gmail account, unfortunatly, those instructions didn’t work for me cause they were specifically for cPanel and not wordpress manage hosting with godaddy. Do you have any suggestions or work around the case of using a gmail account to receive notifications? This is just like a nightmare for both clients and developers. ugh!