Defaults.Exposed › Stats › Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
What percent of SPF records end in ~all (soft fail)?
October 2026 census edition
As of October 12, 2026, 55.5% of the 157,065,571 SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records in the Defaults.Exposed census end in ~all (soft fail), 87,173,390 domains asking receivers to merely flag, not reject, unauthorized senders.
SPF soft fail share: 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.
A record ending in ~all asks receivers to accept unlisted senders but mark them as suspicious. Most receivers treat that as a weak signal, which makes soft fail a compromise that avoids breakage and delivers correspondingly little protection. Its popularity relative to hard fail is a measure of how cautiously domains deploy.
The denominator under that share is 157,065,571: the population where this particular check had something to read. A domain the census could not decide on is recorded as undetermined and left out of it, never counted as a failure.
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 soft fail share: how to cite it
Please cite Defaults.Exposed and link this page. The citation below carries the date.
Defaults.Exposed, "What percent of SPF records end in ~all (soft fail)?" (as of October 12, 2026). https://defaults.exposed/stats/what-percent-of-spf-records-use-soft-fail
Permalink: https://defaults.exposed/stats/what-percent-of-spf-records-use-soft-fail · Machine-readable: /stats/s/spf-softfail.json · Licence: open data
Methodology: how we grade the internet · Source data: census data and downloads. Updated with each census edition.