Merging SPF instead of overwriting it
Mail setup tools love to replace your SPF record. mailbuda merges into it, finds the right Cloudflare zone across accounts, and waits until the world agrees.
When mailbuda adds a domain, it writes the DNS records your mail provider needs: a verification TXT, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Most of those are new records and the only risk is a typo. SPF is different. There is one SPF record per domain, you may already have one, and whatever is in it is probably there for a reason.
The overwrite problem
The naive approach, and the one most provider setup guides describe, is to set the SPF record to the provider’s recommended value: v=spf1 include:mxroute.com -all or similar. If you were also sending through a transactional mail service, a newsletter tool or your own server, those are now gone from SPF, and their mail starts failing checks. You find out when a customer forwards a bounce.
What mailbuda does
It reads the existing TXT records at the domain root, finds the one that starts with v=spf1, and parses it into mechanisms. If the provider’s include: is already there, nothing changes. If it is not, it is inserted before the all mechanism, and the record is written back with everything else intact. If there is no SPF record, one is created with the provider’s include and ~all, which is the softer default and the right one for a domain whose owner has not thought about SPF yet.
Two guard rails. SPF limits a record to ten DNS lookups; mailbuda counts the includes it can see and warns before writing if the merge would exceed that, because an SPF record over the limit fails for everyone. And a record with more than one v=spf1 TXT is already broken, so mailbuda refuses to touch it and shows both.
Which zone?
People who use mailbuda tend to have more than one Cloudflare account, and a domain’s zone can be in any of them. The provider API just wants records to exist; it does not care who writes them. mailbuda asks each connected Cloudflare account for the zone by name, uses the first one that answers, and remembers the mapping. If no account has the zone, the domain page shows the records to add by hand, with a copy button, and keeps checking.
Waiting for the world
Writing the records at Cloudflare is instant. Resolvers around the world catching up is not. mailbuda does not mark a record as done when the API call returns; it marks it done when the value resolves through public resolvers (Cloudflare’s own, Google’s and Quad9). Until then the domain page shows each record as pending, and the mailbox creation step waits for the provider’s verification record specifically. For a domain that was never on Cloudflare before, this takes a minute. For one with an old record and a long TTL it can take hours, and the page says so instead of failing.
Why this is in a mail panel at all
Because the DNS step is where mail setup goes wrong, and it goes wrong silently. The provider accepts the domain, mail is delivered to the inbox, and nothing complains until a message to a strict recipient is rejected. The point of mailbuda is one place where every domain on every provider is visibly correct, and that means doing the DNS carefully rather than fast.