title: SPF record descriptive text broken into two separate quoted strings
body: <p>I would like to know if anyone else has ever had this happen. I have a domain whose DNS is hosted with rackspace. When I configured the TXT (SPF) record, I never include quotes for the descriptive text -- most hosts don't allow you to enter them anyway. Here's an example of a string that I entered when configuring an SPF record on rackspace:</p>
  
  <pre><code>v=spf1 mx a include:_spf.google.com ~all
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But when I query rackspace's DNS servers directly, I get the following result:</p>
  
  <pre><code>host -t txt example.tld
  example.tld descriptive text "v=spf1 mx a include:_spf.google.com " "~all"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I query the TXT record of another domain, whose DNS is hosted by Network Solutions, and whose SPF info was entered in the exact same way, I get the following result:</p>
  
  <pre><code>host -t txt example.tld
  example.tld descriptive text "v=spf1 mx a include:_spf.google.com ~all"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Notice, the descriptive text is one continuous string, not two as in the result before it.</p>
  
  <p>I get the same results with dig. I haven't yet been able to confirm whether this is causing any problems (yet), but it is the first time I've seen the descriptive text broken into two separate double-quoted strings. I've asked rackspace tech support about it and they have confirmed that they're seeing the same thing, but they couldn't explain why. Furthermore, this <em>wasn't</em> happening just a few days ago -- I know because I had to paste some TXT query results from one of the rackspace hosted domains into an e-mail. I pasted them verbatim. Before posting this, I checked the message in my sent mail to confirm whether it wasn't happening then, or it was but I simply didn't notice -- it wasn't.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone else ever seen this? Does it even matter? Thanks in advance.</p>