Why SPF matters for you
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is the DNS record that lists which servers are allowed to send email for your domain. Receiving servers check it on every single message — if the sending server isn’t authorized, your mail is treated as suspicious and filtered to spam or rejected outright.
It’s also foundational to everything else: DMARC can only protect your domain from spoofing if SPF (or DKIM) passes. So a broken SPF record doesn’t just hurt one email — it quietly undermines your entire authentication stack.
How SPF quietly breaks
The most common failure is invisible. SPF allows a maximum of 10 DNS lookups, and every include: — Google, your CRM, your marketing platform, your helpdesk — eats into that budget. Add one tool too many and you cross the limit, at which point receivers return PermError and SPF fails for ALL your mail, even though the record looks perfectly fine.
Other silent killers: an overly permissive +all that lets anyone spoof you, a record published on the wrong subdomain, or two SPF records on the same domain (which is invalid and breaks both). None of these produce an error message you’d ever notice on your own.
Go one include: over SPF’s 10-lookup limit and receivers return PermError — failing SPF for ALL your mail, even though the record looks perfectly fine.
How Zeqo works for you
This checker doesn’t just fetch your record — it resolves every include, counts your real lookups against the limit, and warns you when you’re a single tool away from PermError. When you’re already over, it can suggest a flattened record that authorizes the same senders with far fewer lookups.
Zeqo Mail then watches it every day. The moment your lookup count creeps toward 10, or someone edits the record, you get an alert with the exact change and the fix — before your mail starts failing, not after a campaign already bounced.
That early warning is the entire point: SPF problems are catastrophic but completely silent, so catching one before it lands is worth far more than diagnosing it afterward.