include:amazonses.com – Amazon SES
Short answer: include:amazonses.com lets Amazon SES's mail servers pass SPF for your domain. It costs 1 of the 10 DNS lookups SPF allows (checked live).
| Service | Amazon SES |
|---|---|
| Lookups | 1 of the 10 DNS lookups SPF allows (checked live) |
| Record now | v=spf1 ip4:199.255.192.0/22 ip4:199.127.232.0/22 ip4:54.240.0.0/18 ip4:69.169.224.0/20 ip4:23.249.208.0/20 ip4:23.251.224.0/19 ip4:76.223.176.0/20 ip4:54.240.64.0/18 ip4:76.223.128.0/19 ip4:216.221.160.0/19 ip4:206.55.144.0/20 ip4:24.110.64.0/18 ip4:98.77.0.0/16 -all |
Do you need it?
Often not. From our Amazon SES setup guide: SPF goes on a custom MAIL FROM subdomain (for example mail.yourdomain.com) with v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all, not on your root domain.
If you added include:amazonses.com only because an old article said so, it may just cost lookups. Send a test email through Amazon SES and see which domain SPF is checked for.
Who uses it
In our scan of top websites on 23 Oct 2026:
- 260 of the 2,214 world's top-3,000 sites that publish SPF (11.7%)
- 124 of the 1,961 India's top-3,000 sites that publish SPF (6.3%)
- 4 of the 428 Indian government sites that publish SPF (0.9%)
Add it the right way
- Keep one SPF record per domain:
v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all, plus your other senders in the same record – SPF generator. - Stay under 10 lookups in total; every include counts, nested ones too.
- SPF alone isn't enough for Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook: turn on DKIM and publish DMARC.
Check your domain
After the fix, send a test email to see SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass on a real message, then keep an eye on it: free DMARC monitoring shows every service that sends mail as your domain and which ones fail, in plain English.
Get it fixed on Fiverr
Prefer to do it yourself? Get the step-by-step Fix Kit ($15) – 28-page guide, checklist, 20+ providers.