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Say that I want to send mail from my own servers at example.com.

As I understand it, I can specify the following SPF record and have any server addressed by an A record under example.com included by the SPF record. So evaluation of mail sent from mailserver1.example.com, mailserver2.example.com would result in a pass:

v=spf1 a ~all

If however I am using an outsourced mail sender say wesendmail.com, I would use an SPF record like this:

v=spf1 include:wesendmail.com ~all

My main question is - If wesendmail.com sends mail from servers at mailserver1.wesendmail.com, mailserver2.wesendmail.com, do I need to include additional SPF records for these servers, or are they captured by the above SPF record?

Also, if I do need to include additional records, how would I find out what their mail servers are? NSLOOKUP domain transfer attempts are blocked by most DNS servers.

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The include clause in your SPF record fetches the corresponding SPF record from wesendmail.com and includes that in-line in your record. So assuming that wesendmail configures their record correctly, you don't need to do anything further.

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    I think this is an excellent answer, but would add a caveat that SPF is completely pointless if you finish with ~all. You can find big-time sysadmins on SF who treat ~all as grounds for rejection. If you're going to bother with SPF at all, please fully-enumerate your sending servers, and finish up with -all. – MadHatter supports Monica Jun 4 '13 at 8:52
  • Your comment regarding ~/- is backed up here docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/sender-id.html – gb2d Jun 4 '13 at 9:33

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