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Add an SPF record in GoDaddy DNS

One TXT (Text) record, at the apex, containing a line your mail provider gives you. The two things GoDaddy gets wrong for people are both field-level: @ belongs in the Name field rather than the domain name, and the value goes in plain because GoDaddy adds the quoting itself.

What goes in the SPF record

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a single line of DNS (Domain Name System) text naming the servers allowed to send mail as your domain. A receiving mail server reads it, works through the mechanisms in order, and decides whether the machine delivering your message is authorised to.

GoDaddy publishes exactly the TXT record you type into its DNS records screen and nothing more. It does not supply an SPF string or add any senders on its own; you have to get the correct v=spf1 value from whichever service sends the domain’s mail and enter it yourself.

GoDaddy is a domain registrar and, for domains that keep its default nameservers, a DNS host.

Check GoDaddy runs the DNS

Sign in to GoDaddy, open the domain and look at the Nameservers section. If it shows GoDaddy’s own nameservers, this is the console to add the record in. If it shows another company’s nameservers, a web host, Cloudflare, or an email provider, the record has to go into that company’s DNS instead, and anything typed at GoDaddy sits there with no effect.

GoDaddy’s nameservers answer for 53,313,849 domains in the October 2026 census, 16.33% of the domains that have nameservers, but a domain registered at GoDaddy can have its DNS elsewhere. The Nameservers section shows whether GoDaddy is the right console for yours.

Add the record in GoDaddy

1. Sign in to GoDaddy and go to the My Products page or the domains list.
2. Find the domain and open its DNS settings, labelled DNS, Manage DNS, or DNS / Records.
3. Look for the list of DNS records and check whether one already starts v=spf1 before adding anything.
4. Click Add or Add New Record to start a new one, or open the existing SPF record to edit it.
5. Choose TXT as the record type from the type menu.
6. In the Name field, also labelled Host, enter @, which means the domain itself rather than a subdomain.
7. In the Value field, also labelled TXT Value or Data, type the SPF string your email provider gave you with no surrounding quotes.
8. Leave the TTL (Time to Live) field at its default setting, since one hour is fine for this record.
9. Click Save and the row is live.

In the Name or Host field enter @ on its own, since GoDaddy appends the domain itself and typing the full domain name there creates the record at the wrong place. Put the SPF string in the Value, TXT Value, or Data field, typed plain with no surrounding double quotes. Leave TTL at its default of one hour.

Traps on this console

• Type the SPF value plain, with no surrounding double quotes. GoDaddy adds the quoting itself, and pasting an already-quoted string can produce a broken, double-quoted record.
• Enter @ in the Name field, not the full domain name. Putting the full domain there creates the record at the wrong place.
• GoDaddy allows only one SPF record per domain. Two records that start with v=spf1 is an error that breaks SPF entirely, so add a further sender by adding another include: to the single existing record rather than creating a second TXT record.
• A record added at GoDaddy has no effect unless GoDaddy’s own nameservers are the ones answering for the domain, so check the Nameservers section before troubleshooting anything else.
• Every include:, a and mx term costs a DNS lookup at evaluation time, and a record that needs more than ten of them fails with a permanent error rather than ignoring the overflow.

Choosing the ending

-all lets a receiver reject mail from an unlisted server on SPF alone, which can bounce forwarded mail before DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is checked. ~all marks that mail as a soft fail and leaves the decision to your DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policy. Both endings are defensible; whichever you choose, list every sender first. For scale, 87,173,390 domains (26.2%) in the census end on softfail, while 175,426,748 (52.8%) carry no SPF record at all.

If you bought Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy

A large number of GoDaddy customers buy the domain, the DNS and the mailboxes in one basket, with the mailboxes being a Microsoft 365 tenant resold by GoDaddy. That arrangement changes what you should expect to find.

When the tenant was provisioned through GoDaddy, the SPF record may already be in the zone, carrying include:spf.protection.outlook.com. If so, there is nothing to add for Microsoft and the only reason to touch the record is a second sender. Check the DNS records list before you type anything.

It also means the record and the mailboxes are administered in two different places despite coming from one invoice. The SPF record lives in the GoDaddy DNS screen; the mailbox settings live in the Microsoft admin centre at admin.microsoft.com. Take a DNS problem to GoDaddy and a mailbox problem to Microsoft.

The same split applies to the other two records. DKIM for a resold tenant is two CNAMEs (Canonical Name records) published here and a toggle switched on at Microsoft, and DMARC is a TXT record at _dmarc in this same GoDaddy screen. None of the three arrives automatically because the mailboxes did.

Wait, then check it

A saved record can take from a few minutes up to a couple of hours to become visible everywhere, and it appears in the same DNS records list under the domain’s DNS settings once saved.

Once it shows, run the free scan against your domain. It resolves the line the way a receiving server does, so a broken include or a duplicate record shows up immediately.

How the scan grades this record: the SPF record check, with its pass and fail rules and how many domains pass it.

Reopen the domain’s DNS records list in GoDaddy to confirm the TXT record saved with @ as the name and the exact value entered, with no added quotes.

SPF authorises sending servers and is checked against the envelope sender, and what a receiver does about a failure is decided by your DMARC policy. The SPF guide walks the check from the receiving end.

Figures from the defaults.exposed census, data as of 12 October 2026. Census numbers move every month; the current values are on the census data page.