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SPF record lists the same sender twice

LowConfirmedQuick winemail.spf.duplicate-mechanism

What this check looks for

The same entry appears more than once in your SPF record. It has no extra effect, and if it is one that costs a DNS lookup it brings you closer to the limit for nothing.

Why it matters

Duplicates are usually a sign that two people edited the record without seeing each other's change — the wasted lookup matters, and so does the confusion the next time someone edits it.

When the check passes, your report says: “Every entry in the SPF record appears once”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 3 points from your Email authentication score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. Email authentication carries a weight of 15 in the overall score.

It shares the email-auth.spf family ceiling of 35 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from Email authentication. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity
low
Default confidence
confirmed
Status when triggered
warn
Deduction
3 points
Family cap
email-auth.spf · 35
Category
Email authentication
Module
Email spf
Fix owned by
dns host
In the ruleset since
2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Delete the repeated entry.

It cannot change the outcome and, for lookup mechanisms, it spends part of your ten-lookup budget.

  1. Remove the second and any later copy of ‹mechanism› from the record.

  2. Re-publish the record as a single TXT string.

How to confirm it worked

  • dig +short TXT ‹domain› — confirm ‹mechanism› appears once

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Technical detail

‹domain› repeats the mechanism ‹mechanism› ‹occurrences› times. RFC 7208 §4.6.2 evaluates terms left to right and stops at the first match, so a repeat can never change the result. When the repeated term is include, a, mx, ptr or exists, every copy is still counted against the ten-lookup limit of §4.6.4.

Standards and references

Test this on your domain

Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

Open the email spf checkerBuild the fix

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