I find it hard to see this as anything other than a bug in whatever scripts
they're using to create their DNS records. The DNS has counts for all
variable length fields, so there's never a need to escape anything in the
bits on the wire.
People who know the protocol would obviously agree, but I'm not certain
everyone pasting these things into zone files has knowledge like that.
They're more likely to follow scripts or examples they find online.
Indeed. That's why it's important to stamp out this kind of mistake
earlier rather than later.
Why "dig" decided to start rendering semi-colons as escaped in their output,
when they're not explicitly so in the zone file or on the wire, is currently
a mystery to me. I'm just concerned that it will confuse some people tasked
with deployment somewhere down the line.
A reasonable concern, but it seems to me that the best response is to
educate people about how to create valid DKIM setups. Early in the life
of SPF there used to be a lot of broken SPF records, but eventually people
got the hang of setting them up.
R's,
John
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