“SOA Expire Value out of recommended range” – what it means
Verdict: Harmless on managed DNS. Harmless unless you run secondary name servers. RFC 1912 suggests an expire value of 2–4 weeks; managed hosts like Cloudflare use 7 days (604800) and serve every answer themselves, so the value is never used.
What the warning checks
The expire value tells a secondary name server how long to keep answering after it loses contact with the primary. Checkers warn when it is under 2 weeks or over 4 weeks.
Does it hurt email delivery?
- It has no effect on mail delivery, SPF, DKIM or DMARC.
- Cloudflare answers from its own anycast network with no secondaries unless you set up outgoing zone transfers.
- Changing SOA values at Cloudflare is an Enterprise-only option.
What to do
- Managed DNS (Cloudflare, Route 53, Google Cloud DNS): ignore it.
- Own primary with secondaries: set expire between 1209600 (2 weeks) and 2419200 (4 weeks).
Check what actually matters
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