Note: This article applies to domains using AutoSPF's standard (traditional) flattening. If your domain has been configured to use Macro Flattening, the behavior is different and this article does not apply.
Short answer: AutoSPF-managed SPF records have a TTL (Time To Live) of 300 seconds (5 minutes). After saving changes in the AutoSPF UI, allow up to 5 minutes before the updated record is visible in DNS.
What Is TTL?
TTL is a DNS setting that controls how long resolvers and mail servers are allowed to cache your SPF record before fetching a fresh copy. A TTL of 300 means any server that has recently looked up your SPF record may continue using its cached copy for up to 5 minutes before checking again.
Why Is the TTL Set to 300 Seconds?
AutoSPF publishes your SPF records through Cloudflare. 300 seconds is the minimum TTL Cloudflare allows — it cannot be set lower. We use this value as our standard across all AutoSPF-managed records.
The upside: 5 minutes is already a very short caching window compared to many DNS providers, which commonly default to 1 hour (3600 seconds) or more.
What This Means When You Make Changes
When you add or remove an email service provider, update an include, or make any other change in the AutoSPF UI:
- The change is applied to your Cloudflare DNS record immediately.
- Servers that have not recently looked up your record will see the change right away.
- Servers that have recently looked up your record will continue using their cached copy for up to 5 minutes.
In practice: Wait up to 5 minutes after saving a change before testing or expecting the new record to be in effect.
Confirming Your Changes Are Live
Because AutoSPF flattens SPF records across multiple levels of includes, a standard DNS lookup won't easily reveal whether a specific nested change has propagated. We recommend using a full SPF resolution tool such as the Vamsoft SPF Policy Tester, which walks the entire include chain and shows the fully resolved result — making it straightforward to confirm a change is live at any depth.