[jhollington]

Originally Posted by tony17112acst

Sorry! I wasn't totally clear; they sent me a message from a gmail account, not a Comcast account.

Ah, well, the fact that they're going that far is probably a good sign. Clearly they've accepted that they can't send to you from a Comcast account, and they still haven't quite figured out why. This means that this is more of a "head-scratcher" than we can possibly imagine... I'd assume if they're going this far, they must have some more knowledgeable people looking into it.

Also, I am glad you recommended sending from the Comcast webmail I will be using that from now on to avoid other problems.

Yes, that's definitely the best route to take. Simplify the scenario down to its basics and avoid conflating it with other potential issues.

So this morning I just removed the IP address from the SPF record and hopefully, I'll research the SPF later - for now, I think it's a valid record, but a lax policy.

You probably don't really need an SPF record at all in your case, but if you're going to have one, your best bet would probably just be to mirror Comcast's, since that's the SMTP server you'll be sending through the most often. Further, Comcast's is very lax, as they use "?all" to denote a "neutral" policy — basically saying that the SPF record doesn't say anything at all about whether it should be checked or not.

The easiest way to build an SPF record if you're going to be sending using Comcast's server is to simply put "include:comcast.net" in your SPF record to automatically inherit whatever Comcast has put in their records. I'd go with the following:

v=spf1 include:comcast.net ?all

Of course, this means anybody at Comcast is allowed to send messages on behalf of your domain, but since one of the main goals of an SPF record is to reduce spam that impersonates you, it's still a good thing — spammers are unlikely to be sending spam through Comcast's servers.

Alternatively, you could just decide that you don't care about what SPF does at all and do something like this:

v=spf1 +all

In the latter case, you'd have an SPF record in place just in case anybody wants to be picky (again, this really shouldn't be an issue, but it doesn't hurt to have one), but you're declaring that anybody on the planet is allowed to send mail from "anthonytonini.com."

So the IP address should be the IP address of the sending server? I'll research it more ...thanks for ALL the great info!

Correct. The purpose of an SPF record is to designate which servers are permitted to sending mail for that domain. If you were actually sending mail from Freehostia, that would be the server to include in there, but since you're not, there's really no point in doing that.

You can read up on the SPF record syntax here.