Should we use SPF (TXT) & SPF (type 99) or just one or the other?

email dns spf
Darthtong picture Darthtong · Dec 20, 2012 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

I was wondering, now our hosing provider supports SPF (type 99), weather or not to also use this type of record as well as the already in place SPF (TXT) record.

  1. Is there any disadvantage of having both records set?
  2. Should type 99 be formatted the same? e.g. "v=spf1 a mx ip4:xx.xxx.xxx.xxx ~all"

Thanks for any guidance!

Answer

Xavier Martinez-Hidalgo picture Xavier Martinez-Hidalgo · Jun 25, 2014

According to the latest Proposed Standard (RFC 7208), you should use TXT records only:

3.1. DNS Resource Records

SPF records MUST be published as a DNS TXT (type 16) Resource Record (RR) [RFC1035] only. The character content of the record is encoded as [US-ASCII]. Use of alternative DNS RR types was supported in SPF's experimental phase but has been discontinued.

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