Question : SPF Google Apps Question

I use Google Apps to send & received email for a domain which is hosting on the IP **.87.***.186 however sometimes there are emails that are generated from the server on which the domain is hosted on and these emails are sent to an email that of the originating domain.  ex//  [email protected] is the from address and an email is sent to the [email protected] email.   For some reasons these emails do not go through.  All other emails get through fine to Google Apps email account.  I reading up on this situation it sounded like I needed to set a SPF record for the domain..

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786

I'm very confused however as to what the record should look like... don't I need to somehow specify what the server ip is or something?  

The only thing I can find is that I use this in the DNS v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Answer : SPF Google Apps Question

Adding an SPF won't help with mails not going through, that's not why SPF exists.

Do you get bounce messages for those that never arrive? Or are you able to check the SMTP logs?

And just in case...

v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

This says that the SPF record should also include the SPF record stored at aspmx.googlemail.com. If you were to run "nslookup -q=txt aspmx.googlemail.com" you would see that it redirects to _spf.google.com, which (finally) states that it will allow this lot to send as the domain name:

"v=spf1 ip4:216.239.32.0/19 ip4:64.233.160.0/19 ip4:66.249.80.0/20 ip4:72.14.192.0/18 ip4:209.85.128.0/17 ip4:66.102.0.0/20 ip4:74.125.0.0/16 ip4:64.18.0.0/20 ip4:207.126.144.0/20 ?all"

Quite a lot really :)

Chris