Issue with Delivery of Gmail Due to SPF Record

A couple of days ago I had a group that had been receiving email from me just fine from my business email account.  I use a Gmail hosted account for it.  All of a sudden, they were not able to receive my email anymore.    I received the following message:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

     emailaddress@emailaddress.com

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:

Unspecified Error (SENT_MESSAGE): Connection timed out

With their help, I was able to figure out that they were not accepting my email because I did not have an SPF record for my domain.  So, I went to add one, and it resolved the issue immediately.  

What is an SPF Record

SPF stands for sender policy framework and is used to try to prevent spam.  You can read all about it here. Basically, it allows the owner of a domain to specify the IP address that email will be coming from.  

Since I had DNS hosted at GoDaddy and my email hosted at Gmail, I needed to figure out exactly what to put into the record.  Here is a link to the steps required to set the information up correctly.