> They're widely understood

I'll tell you right now, I've had multiple cases where I've had to quote parts of the RFCs to large companies because they were handling email authentication incorrectly.

They are wildly misunderstood. The moment I see "add this include: directive to your SPF record" in some marketing platform's integration documentation I know they're going to fuck something up.

To add-on, the really pro move is to not touch the client's SPF record at all. Use your own domain in the SMTP envelope and have SPF be valid for that. Just have the client establish DKIM records and use DKIM, and only DKIM, to pass DMARC.

If you insist on using the client domain in the envelope, make it a subdomain with MX records back to your infrastructure (so you can track bounces). That will pass relaxed alignment - or just use a subdomain in the from and now you're passing strict alignment as well.

Most companies have no idea how the envelope domain impacts bounces and frankly, doesn't care about tracking them.

A shockingly high number of companies have no idea of the concept of the envelope address.

I wouldn't recommend for your own mental stability to look at /r/sysadmin when it comes to any sort of DNS or E-Mail issues. It really shows just how many bad systems administrators there are out there, who do not have a basic understanding of the systems they're using.