On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Mark wrote:
4.6.3 Modifiers
- Modifiers MAY appear anywhere in the record, but SHOULD appear at
the end, after all mechanisms. Ordering of modifiers does not matter.
Ordering sometimes does matter, especially with redirect modifier.
Consider the following two lines:
v=spf1 mx -all redirect=r2._spf.example.com
v=spf1 redirect=r2._spf.example.com mx -all
Are they really the same to the spf interpreter?
In your first example, everything after "-all" is to be ignored anyway, so
the order of any tailing modifiers is moot. In your second example, it is
not the order of the modifiers that matters, but the place of the modifier
in the overall order (as "-all" is not a modifier, but a mechanism).
Consider the first example changed as follows:
v=spf1 mx redirect=r2._spf.example.com
v=spf1 redirect=r2._spf.example.com mx
As you can see the order of placement for redirect matters a lot as unless
I'm mistaken in the second case mx would never be evaluated.
But I note that my point was actually about order of modifers between each
other. The current text says that order of modifiers does not matter, I
think it does matter and if redirect is placed before explnation modifier
then explanation is ignored (can people who write spf libraries confirm if
this is so?).
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net