Misconception 1: Using SPF will protect our organization from every scenario in which hostile element abuses our organizational identity. However, your risk will be higher. 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. Text. Can we say that we should automatically block E-mail message which their organization doesnt support the use of SPF? 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. The sender identity can be any identity, such as the sender identity of a well-known organization/company, and in some cases; the hostile element is rude enough to use the identity of our organization for attacking one of our organization users (such as in spear phishing attack). Enabling one or more of the ASF settings is an aggressive approach to spam filtering. Basically, SPF, along with DKIM, DMARC, and other technologies supported by Office 365, help prevent spoofing and phishing. For more information, see Example: SPF TXT record for multiple outbound on-premises mail servers and Microsoft 365. domain name is the domain you want to add as a legitimate sender. Ensure that you're familiar with the SPF syntax in the following table. We are going to start with looking up the DNS records that Microsoft 365 is expecting and then add the correct SPF record to our DNS hosting provider: First, we are going to check the expected SPF record in the Microsoft 365 Admin center. SPF identifies which mail servers are allowed to send mail on your behalf. The reason for the outcome of SPF = Fail is related to a missing configuration on the sending mail infrastructure., The E-mail address of the sender, uses the domain name of, The result from the SPF sender verification test is , The popular organization users who are being attacked, The various types of Spoofing or Phishing attacks, The E-mail address of the sender includes our domain name (in our specific scenario; the domain name is, The result of the SPF sender verification check is fail (SPF = Fail). Instruct the Exchange Online what to do regarding different SPF events.. The setting is located at Exchange admin Center > protection > spam filter > double click Default > advanced options > set SPF record: hard fail: off . Yes. If you have a hybrid configuration (some mailboxes in the cloud, and . You do not need to make any changes immediately, but if you receive the "too many lookups" error, modify your SPF TXT record as described in Set up SPF in Microsoft 365 to help prevent spoofing. Also, if your custom domain does not have an SPF TXT record, some receiving servers may reject the message outright. This phase can describe as the active phase in which we define a specific reaction to such scenarios. Read Troubleshooting: Best practices for SPF in Office 365. If you have anti-spoofing enabled and the SPF record: hard fail ( MarkAsSpamSpfRecordHardFail) turned on, you will probably get more false positives. The enforcement rule is usually one of these options: Hard fail. - last edited on Use DMARC to validate email, setup steps - Office 365 You can list multiple outbound mail servers. Generate and Send an incident report to a designated recipient (shared mailbox) that will include information about the characters of the event + the original E-mail message. In this example, the SPF rule instructs the receiving email server to only accept mail from these IP addresses for the domain contoso.com: This SPF rule tells the receiving email server that if a message comes from contoso.com, but not from one of these three IP addresses, the receiving server should apply the enforcement rule to the message. For questions and answers about anti-spam protection, see Anti-spam protection FAQ. If you have a hybrid configuration (some mailboxes in the cloud, and some mailboxes on premises) or if you're an Exchange Online Protection standalone customer, add the outbound IP address of . Scenario 2 the sender uses an E-mail address that includes. Instead, ensure that you use TXT records in DNS to publish your SPF information. The E-mail is a legitimate E-mail message. If you set up mail when you set up Microsoft 365, you already created an SPF TXT record that identifies the Microsoft messaging servers as a legitimate source of mail for your domain. You can only create one SPF TXT record for your custom domain. Setting up SPF in Office 365 means you need to create an SPF record that specifies all your legitimate outgoing email hosts, and publish it in the DNS. Messages that contain words from the sensitive word list in the subject or message body are marked as high confidence spam. You need all three in a valid SPF TXT record. If you're already familiar with SPF, or you have a simple deployment, and just need to know what to include in your SPF TXT record in DNS for Microsoft 365, you can go to Set up SPF in Microsoft 365 to help prevent spoofing. 04:08 AM Microsoft itself first adopted the new email authentication requirements several weeks before deploying it to customers. If the receiving server finds out that the message comes from a server other than the Office 365 messaging servers listed in the SPF record, the receiving mail server can choose to reject the message as spam. ASF settings in EOP - Office 365 | Microsoft Learn Failing SPF will not cause Office 365 to drop a message, at best it will mark it as Junk, but even that wont happen in all scenarios. Your email address will not be published. We do not recommend disabling anti-spoofing protection. This tag allows plug-ins or applications to run in an HTML window. Some services have other, more strict checks, but few go as far as EOP to block unauthenticated email and treat them as spoofed messages. Given that we are familiar with the exact structure of our mail infrastructure, and given that we are sure that our SPF record includes the right information about our mail servers IP address, the conclusion is that there is a high chance that the E-mail is indeed spoofed E-mail! Use the syntax information in this article to form the SPF TXT record for your custom domain. 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. To get started, see Use DKIM to validate outbound email sent from your custom domain in Microsoft 365. In the current article series, our primary focus will be how to implement an SPF policy for incoming mail, by using the option of Exchange rule, and not by using the Exchange Online spam filter policy option. SPF Record Error when sending to one domain in particular Set Up SPF Record Office 365 to Prevent Spoofing and - DuoCircle There is no right answer or a definite answer that will instruct us what to do in such scenarios. The simple truth is that we cannot prevent this scenario because we will never be able to have control over the external mail infrastructure that is used by these hostile elements. What is the conclusion such as scenario, and should we react to such E-mail message? Make sure that you include all mail systems in your SPF record, otherwise, mail sent from these systems will be listed as spam messages. All SPF TXT records start with this value, Office 365 Germany, Microsoft Cloud Germany only, On-premises email system. An SPF TXT record is a DNS record that helps prevent spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name from which email messages are sent. This article provides frequently asked questions and answers about anti-spoofing protection for Microsoft 365 organizations with mailboxes in Exchange Online, or standalone Exchange Online Protection (EOP) organizations without Exchange Online mailboxes. Continue at Step 7 if you already have an SPF record. Domain administrators publish SPF information in TXT records in DNS. This type of scenario, there is a high chance that we are experiencing a Spoof mail attack! Test mode is not available for this setting. One drawback of SPF is that it doesn't work when an email has been forwarded. Creating multiple records causes a round robin situation and SPF will fail. The rest of this article uses the term SPF TXT record for clarity. For example, one of the most popular reasons for the result fail when using the SPF sender verification test is a problem or a miss configuration, in which the IP address of one of our mail server/services that our organization use, was not added to the SPF record. This conception is partially correct because of two reasons: Misconception 2: SPF mechanism was built for identifying an event of incoming mail, in which the sender Spoof his identity, and as a response, react to this event and block the specific E-mail message. 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. You add an SPF TXT record that lists the Office 365 messaging servers as legitimate mail servers for your domain. SPF helps validate outbound email sent from your custom domain (is coming from who it says it is). 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. This change should reduce the risk of SharePoint Online notification messages ending up in the Junk Email folder. In reality, we can never be sure in 100%, that the E-mail message is indeed spoofed E-mail message or, a legitimate E-mail message. The organization publishes an SPF record (implemented as TXT record) that includes information about the IP address of the mail servers, which are authorized to send an E-mail message on behalf of the particular domain name. 01:13 AM When this setting is enabled, any message that hard fails a conditional Sender ID check is marked as spam.