Creating a SPF record to avoid mail being classified as spam

Emails sent via VETenrol and VETsurvey originate from VETtrak servers. These servers are external to your organisation and this can cause some confusion, especially if you are trying to email someone else within your organisation.

If you set up as the main email address in VETenrol or VETsurvey as say info@yourorganisation.com and you are trying to send an email to john@yourorganisation.com via VETenrol or VETsurvey, info@yourorganisation.com becomes the sending address. To your mail server it looks as though external parties are trying to send email to an internal addresses and to a mail server they look as though they are spam and subsequently these messages may either get blocked by your mail server or marked as spam.


To avoid emails being trapped as spam in this situation adding an SPF record to your organisations DNS settings may be useful.

An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain. The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forged From addresses at your domain.

Now its hard to give an exact rule for every organisation. Some may already have a SPF record that needs updating, others may not have one at all.


If you don’t have any kind of SPF record for your domain, here is a suggested version for allowing mail from VETtrak mail servers:

v=spf1 include:spf.hbtoutbound.vettrak.com.au ?all

If you already have an SPF record please ensure that the VETtrak IPs 103.102.118.1 and 103.102.118.9 are added, or include our SPF record spf.hbtoutbound.vettrak.com.au


While we do not anticipate any change to the outgoing IP address of our network in Hobart due to us owning the IP range, including our SPF record has the benefit of not requiring any change on your end if a network change does occur.

The method for updating these DNS entries will vary depending on your provider.

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