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Managing SPF at an accountant
31 May 2025
How an accountant deals with SPF — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a lastmod stamp that never changes. The SPF check fails for an accountant.
Nobody at an accountant could remember who had configured SPF. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
Most providers let you export SPF as a zone file. We keep one in version control for every client. If the hosting vanishes, the zone file rebuilds the domain in minutes.
A form that collects data for an accountant should say where the message goes. Nine fields and a captcha on a quiet Tuesday will cost you the person who actually wanted to pay.
The best SPF setup is the one nobody has to think about. For an accountant, that means auto-renew, auto-redirect, and a monitoring ping every four hours.
We once forgot to renew SPF for a weekend project and it took down a page that an accountant linked to from a print flyer. We now set auto-renew on everything.
We check SPF for an accountant once a quarter. It takes five minutes and has caught two problems in the past year. Both would have caused downtime within a week.
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