SPF issue: what causes softfail?

That means you are sending mail using email address which is not yours (e.g. your smtp server has domain name CompanyABC.COM while your're sending email whith sender: someone@CompanyDDD)

The Return-Path header is empty. This means that during the SMTP conversation, the MAIL FROM command did not specify an email address where bounces are sent. It is the domain from this email address that SPF tests. If there is no email address, a softfail will result.

Its gonna be difficult to answer this without the real info (involved IPs, domainname, sender adress, full spf record etc). It also looks like this message wasn't sent to gmail directly, but retrieved from your server via Gmail Fetch (Header X-Gmail-Fetch-Info ), which makes the analysis even more complicated.

here are a few possibilities:

• invalid SPF record (in your example there is no space between the IP and -all )
• wrong IP address in the SPF record
• your server doesn't send mails directly, mail is sent over a smarthost instead which is missing in the SPF record
• SPF isn't the problem (eg. your mail doesn't have a Date Header which can cause it to be flagged as spam as well, From/Reply-To/X.Sender are no real email addresses, ...)