Why am I getting a softfail from Google Mail with my custom mail server?

Technical Q&A
1

I have a domain, which I’m hosting myself on an external server.

I am using Shopify as the frontend to my product, so that I can take advantage of the ecommerce features.

What I want to do however is to send email from my own server. This seems to be a problem as my domain example.com, has a the following DNS setup:

A [email removed] 23.227.38.65 (Shopify server so that my domain example.com goes to shopify)

MX [email removed] mail.example.com

A mail 123.123.123.123 (my app server IP - where mail server is sending emails from)

TXT [email removed] “v=spf1 +mx a ip4:123.123.123.123 ~all” (the SPF record I have configured)

my SPF record has a softfail w Google:

spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning welcome@example.com does not designate 123.123.123.123 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=welcome@example.com

I’m thinking this has something to do with the fact that the email is coming from example.com (which has an A record pointing to shopify servers).

Why am I getting a SOFTFAIL from google mail?

2

Hi @konradw ,

Are you seeing the softfail with messages sent by Shopify? It sounds like you haven’t set up authentication for Shopify, that’s all. Currently you only have your own mail server authorised. Visit this link to set it up:

https://www.shopify.com/admin/settings/sender-email

This will involve adding some CNAME

records.

Let me know how you get on.