Mailgun and the SPF lookup limit
5 of 10 lookups
include:mailgun.org
— was 3, now 5.
Five lookups, half your budget, and it has nearly doubled. The top-level include carries both the US and EU regions.
include:mailgun.org is a wrapper. It contains the US region and the EU region, and the US region is itself split across two further includes. A receiving server walks the lot: five DNS-resolving terms before it has considered a single one of your own senders.
An account is provisioned in one region. Whichever yours is, you are paying for the other one on every evaluation.
This is one of the clearest cases of drift we have measured. The same include cost three lookups on the older Expurgate list and costs five now. If you sized your record against that number, it no longer fits, and nothing told you.
What it costs by region
| Region | Lookups | Include |
|---|---|---|
| All regions as published | 5 | mailgun.org |
| United States | 3 | _spf.mailgun.org |
| Europe | 1 | _spf.eu.mailgun.org |
Naming your own region saves 4 lookups. Mailgun documents these includes, so this is a supported change rather than a trick.
What to do
- Publish the include for the region your account is actually in. Mailgun documents both, and an EU account drops from five lookups to one.
- A US account saves less, going from five to three, because that region is itself split in two. Still worth taking.
- Confirm the region in your Mailgun dashboard before changing anything. Sending domains are region-scoped, and pointing at the wrong one authorises nothing.
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
mailgun.org
to see the 4 lookups nested inside
it. The tree reports 4 rather than 5 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. 5
lookups for
include:mailgun.org, 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
- Freshdesk — 7 lookups
- Every vendor we measure