Vendor lookup costs

Zoho and the SPF lookup limit

Five lookups if you publish include:zoho.com. One, if you publish the include Zoho actually intends you to use.

There are three Zoho includes in circulation and they are not interchangeable. include:zoho.com is the expensive one: it fans out to four further includes covering Zoho Mail, its campaign sender, its mail platform and its POP relay, and costs five lookups.

include:zohomail.com is narrower at two. include:spf.zoho.com is the one most Zoho Mail customers actually need, and costs one.

The trap is that all three work, in the sense that mail from Zoho passes under any of them. Nothing signals that you picked the expensive one until your record crosses ten terms and a different vendor starts failing.

What it costs by region

What to do

• If you use Zoho Mail, publish include:spf.zoho.com. That is the documented include for the service and it costs one lookup instead of five.
• Only use the broader includes if you also send through Zoho Campaigns or its POP relay, and check whether you actually do. Inherited records often carry the wide include because somebody pasted the first result they found.

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 zoho.com 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.

Related

• Google Workspace — 1 lookup
• Microsoft 365 — 1 lookup
• Every vendor we measure