SPF, which is short for Sender Policy Framework, is an e-mail safety system, which is designed to verify if an email message is sent by an official server. Employing SPF protection for a domain name will stop the forging of emails made with the domain. In layman's terms: activating this feature for a domain name creates a particular record in the Domain Name System (DNS) which contains the IP addresses of the servers that are allowed to send e-mails from mailboxes under the domain. Once this record propagates globally, it exists on all of the DNS servers that route the Internet traffic. Any time some e-mail message is sent, the initial DNS server it uses verifies whether it originates from an approved server. In the event it does, it is sent to the destination address, but if it doesn't come from a server listed in the SPF record for the domain, it is discarded. Thus nobody will be able to mask an e-mail address and make it look as if you are e-mailing spam messages. This approach is also known as email spoofing.