Hey everyone! I need some guidance on an email issue we've been facing. For the past two days, emails sent from our e-commerce company to Microsoft addresses (like hotmail.co.uk and outlook.com) have been bouncing back with the error code **550 5.7.515 Access denied**. I think Microsoft is enforcing stricter controls on larger email senders, which might explain the problem.
I used a tool to analyze our email headers and noticed that our origin server's IP address is included, even though we're using Google Workspace for SMTP. Google's documentation advises against creating MX records for our origin domain. One of the errors indicated was that our IP address is **NOT** allowed to send on behalf of our email address, resulting in a softfail. I'm considering adding the IP address to our SPF record to resolve this, but I'm not sure if that's the right approach or if there's a deeper issue at play. Just to clarify, we didn't make any changes on our end right before this started happening. We're using Cloudflare for our DNS. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
It sounds like you're on the right track! Since your server is the one sending emails through Google SMTP, you definitely need to add the public IP of your web server to your SPF record. Avoid sending large volumes directly from your own IP—you might want to use services like Mailchimp or SendGrid for that.
Thanks for confirming that I’m heading in the right direction! I'm definitely going to add the IP address to the SPF and see if it helps.