Can anyone see my domain's DNS records?
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Yes, and that is the whole point of them.
When your email arrives at Gmail or Outlook, the receiving server has never met you. To decide what to do with the message, it looks up your domain's DNS records: where your mail should be delivered, which services may send as you, the public key that checks your signature, and what you want done with mail that fails. None of that needs a private agreement with the receiver. It is all public, and that is what makes the checks independent. Nobody has to take your word for it. They can look.
So anyone can see what a receiving server sees. A free online checker or a single command shows it in seconds. Run dig TXT kelp-street.example and you get the domain's SPF record. Run dig TXT _dmarc.kelp-street.example and you get its DMARC policy. No account, no permission, no login.
Here is what someone can learn from your public records:
- Who hosts your mailboxes. Your MX record names your mail servers, and a name like aspmx.l.google.com points to Google Workspace.
- Which tools send as you. Each
include:in your SPF record names a service, so your email platform is often visible. Some platforms send from their own domain, so not every tool shows up. - How strict your DMARC is. Whether you monitor, quarantine or reject, and the address your reports go to.
- Your DKIM public key. That one is meant to be public. The private key that signs your mail stays with the sending server and is never published.
What stays private is anything served only inside your own network. With split-horizon DNS, machines on your network can see records the outside world never does, and receiving servers only ever read the public view.
Two things follow. Treat every record you publish as public, because it is. And if anyone can read your records, so can you. Looking at your own setup from the outside is the quickest way to see what every inbox sees.
Our free SPF checker and DMARC parser show your records as the world resolves them. If something looks wrong and you are not sure what to do next, the SOS hotline is free.
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