DEV Community

Cover image for 50.2% of SPF records use ~all (softfail) — most email says "maybe"
Alexandre B
Alexandre B

Posted on Originally published at deliverability.mailtester.ninja

50.2% of SPF records use ~all (softfail) — most email says "maybe"

By the team at MailTester Ninja, a real-time email verification API that stores nothing.

76.9% of domains publish an SPF record. But SPF only bites if it ends in -all (hardfail). Here's how SPF publishers actually terminate their record:

  • ~all, 50.2%
  • -all, 44.8%
  • noneall, 2.6%
  • ?all, 2.4%
  • +all, 0%

~all (softfail, 50.2%) tells receivers "this probably isn't authorized… but deliver it anyway." -all (hardfail, 44.8%) tells them to reject it. Softfail is the safe default that never gets tightened, which means most domains publish SPF that a spoofer can walk straight past. If you own the domain and every legitimate sender is listed, -all is where you want to be.


Check any domain yourself, MailTester Ninja's free deliverability tools cover it end to end in one place: MX / SPF / DMARC analysis, an inbox-placement test scored out of 100, an SPF & DMARC generator and a blocklist checker, all with no signup and nothing stored. Need to confirm whether a specific mailbox actually exists and is deliverable? That is exactly what MailTester Ninja's email verifier does in real time, and we store no data.

Source: MailTester Ninja's open Email Infrastructure Index, a live DNS scan of 50,000 of the world's most-linked domains, updated daily, aggregate only. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0. Snapshot: Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:18:29 GMT.

Top comments (0)