Defaults.Exposed › Stats › Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
How many SPF records use +all?
October 2026 census edition
As of October 12, 2026, 40,988 domains publish an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record ending in +all: a directive that authorizes the entire internet to send mail as that domain, making the record worse than publishing nothing.
SPF +all (worse than nothing): how it is measured
It comes from the SPF parsing pass, which retrieves every published SPF record, follows its mechanisms, and records both the terminal qualifier and the DNS-lookup cost of evaluating it. Every domain in the census is measured directly and counted once.
The record is worse than nothing because a receiver that would otherwise be suspicious now has an explicit authorisation to point at. Almost every instance comes from a misunderstanding of the syntax.
The figure is an absolute count of domains rather than a sample scaled up. A domain the census could not decide on is left out rather than estimated.
It moves when domain owners publish, correct or remove the DNS (Domain Name System) records that authenticate their mail. Every one of those records is free and takes minutes to publish, and together they decide whether someone else can send mail as the domain. The number is recomputed from the raw evidence at every edition. What it cannot tell you is where one particular domain stands: for that, see fix your email authentication.
the full grading methodology · the underlying dataset, published open with the counts behind every percentage. If a figure here disagrees with one elsewhere on the site, the dataset is canonical and we would like to know.
SPF +all (worse than nothing): how to cite it
Please cite Defaults.Exposed and link this page. The citation below carries the date.
Defaults.Exposed, "How many SPF records use +all?" (as of October 12, 2026). https://defaults.exposed/stats/how-many-spf-records-use-plus-all
Permalink: https://defaults.exposed/stats/how-many-spf-records-use-plus-all · Machine-readable: /stats/s/spf-plus-all.json · Licence: open data
Methodology: how we grade the internet · Source data: census data and downloads. Updated with each census edition.