I read the SPF records of 52 SaaS companies. Their lifecycle marketing leaves through three platforms, at the median.

Every lifecycle marketing diagram I have drawn shows one journey inside one tool: signup, welcome, day three nudge, trial ending, upgrade. The customer never gets that journey. They get a welcome from one system, a receipt from a second, a support reply from a third and a survey from a fourth.

I wanted to know how many systems that really is, so I read it off the one place every company has to publish it.

SPF is a DNS record listing who may send mail as your domain. Each outside platform needs its own include line, so the record doubles as a public list of who writes to your customers in your name. On 24 September I read it for 52 SaaS companies, on the main domain and on eleven common mail subdomains, following every include the way a receiving server does. Then I set aside staff mail (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, security gateways) and HR or training tools, and counted what was left: platforms that write to customers.

Three companies gave nothing readable. Canva lists only its own IP ranges, HubSpot only its own product, and Twilio hides everything behind a flattening service.

The other 49 had a median of three.

31 of the 49 authorise three or more. 16 authorise four or more. monday.com authorises seven: GetResponse, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Mailgun, Qualtrics, Salesforce and Zendesk. Three of those are marketing tools.

It is not unusual. Ten companies authorise two or more marketing platforms. Zoom has Mailchimp, Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud side by side, and GitHub has Mailchimp next to Marketo. Thirteen run marketing, product mail and support through three separate systems.

The most common name was not a marketing platform at all. Zendesk shows up at 24 companies, ahead of Marketo, SendGrid and Salesforce at 17 each.

What three senders do to a lifecycle marketing program

Each platform keeps its own unsubscribe list. Somebody who leaves the newsletter in Marketo is still a contact in the Qualtrics survey and in whatever sends the trial reminders. Google’s FAQ expects unsubscribes honoured within 48 hours, and the US CAN-SPAM Act gives 10 business days. Neither rule cares which of your tools received the click.

Frequency has the same problem. A welcome from HubSpot, a receipt from Amazon SES and a support follow-up from Zendesk can land on the same morning, and no single tool can see all three to hold one back.

Reputation is shared. Gmail tracks the spam rate of your domain and wants it below 0.10%. Complaints about a newsletter count against the domain that sends your password resets.

Much of this is easy to miss. At 22 of 52 companies at least one sender appeared only on a subdomain record. Notion’s main record authorises nobody; Mailgun and Marketo sit on mail.notion.so.

What to check in your own account

Run dig +short TXT yourdomain.com, then repeat for every subdomain your mail uses: mail, email, em, e, go, info, hello, updates. Write each include on its own line.

Next to each line, write the messages that platform sends and the name of the person who owns it. The welcome series usually sits in one tool and the receipts in another. If a line has no owner, it is probably a vendor you stopped paying.

Then pick one list to hold every unsubscribe and sync the others to it. Most platforms accept a suppression import or an API call. It is the rule from the CRM automation guide applied to one field: decide which system owns it and make the others read from it.

Last, put the sends of every tool on one calendar for a single test contact and look at one week. A stop condition from the drip timing lesson only works if every sender reads it.

What the records could not tell me

An include is permission, not proof. It does not say whether the platform sent anything this year, and old lines survive long after a contract ends. Some platforms send with their own bounce domain and never need a line in your record, so the real count is probably higher than mine. Five companies hide some or all of their senders behind flattening services such as Valimail and AutoSPF.

The detail I keep coming back to is Qualtrics. Seven companies authorise it, Slack and Stripe among them, which means a survey leaves in their name from a tool the lifecycle team may never log into. I could not find out whether leaving Slack’s marketing list stops that survey. The record says Qualtrics may send. It says nothing about who tells Qualtrics you left.

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