The University IT will use the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) method as additional measure to make mail traffic more secure. The University of Mannheim will then be ranked as trustworthy sender. At the same time, it is less likely that the university will be blocked by other e-mail providers.
E-Mail providers such as Microsoft or Google use, inter alia, the SPF method to check if the mail server of the Domain Name System (DNS) of an institution is an authorized sender. If this is not the case, e-mails of this sender are assigned a higher spam level and may be blocked. If this happens repeatedly, the SMTP server will be added to the black list of this provider and will be blocked.
In order to prevent this from happening, an entry will be added to the DNS, with a list of SPF servers. This entry is an additional information for external e-mail provider. For systems that do not check for SPF the entry is irrelevant. We do not expect that the entry restricts mail traffic.