Freshdesk and the SPF lookup limit
7 of 10 lookups
include:email.freshdesk.com
— was 8, now 7.
Seven lookups, and one of them is SendGrid. If you also send through SendGrid directly, you are paying for it twice.
Freshdesk's include contains SendGrid's entire record plus four regional lists of its own: United States, Europe, India and Australia. A receiving server walks all of them, whichever region your helpdesk actually lives in.
The SendGrid nesting is the part worth knowing. SPF counts terms, not distinct destinations, so a record carrying both include:email.freshdesk.com and include:sendgrid.net pays for SendGrid's lookups twice over. That is a common pairing, because plenty of organisations run a helpdesk and a transactional sender side by side without realising one contains the other.
It is slightly cheaper than it was, at seven rather than eight, but that is not improvement worth relying on. It moved because Freshdesk reorganised its own regions, and it can move back.
What it costs by region
| Region | Lookups | Include |
|---|---|---|
| All regions as published | 7 | email.freshdesk.com |
| United States | 1 | fdspfus.freshemail.io |
| Europe | 1 | fdspfeuc.freshemail.io |
| India | 1 | fdspfind.freshemail.io |
| Australia | 1 | fdspfaus.freshemail.io |
These hostnames work, but Freshdesk does not publish them as a customer-facing interface. Do not hardcode one. A name nobody promised you can be renumbered without notice, and the symptom is your mail quietly failing SPF rather than an error anyone sees.
What to do
- Check whether you are paying for SendGrid twice. If your record carries both this include and include:sendgrid.net, that is two lookups spent on one destination.
- Do not hardcode the regional hostnames. They resolve, and each one costs a single lookup, but Freshdesk does not publish them as a customer-facing interface. A name that is not promised to you can be renumbered without notice, and the symptom is your mail quietly failing SPF.
- Move the helpdesk to its own subdomain, so its lookups come out of that subdomain's budget rather than your root domain's, or hand the record to SPF Guru and keep the documented include.
Check your own record
These numbers are what the include costs on its own. What matters is the total across your whole record, because the ten term limit applies to the evaluation, not to any one vendor.
Expand
email.freshdesk.com
to see the 6 lookups nested inside
it. The tree reports 6 rather than 7 because it
counts the terms in that record; the include: that reaches it is
the one your own record adds.
Check your own domain to see what the whole record costs and get a replacement that fits.
Measured, not quoted. 7
lookups for
include:email.freshdesk.com, evaluated against live DNS on
2026-09-09 with the same engine behind the
SPF checker. Vendor records move without announcement,
so this is re-checked weekly rather than written down once.
Related
- SendGrid — 2 lookups
- Mimecast — 9 lookups
- Every vendor we measure