A TXT record (short for text record) is a type of resource record in the Domain name system (DNS) used to provide the ability to associate arbitrary text with a host or other name, such as human readable information about a server, network, data center, or other accounting information. It is also often used in a more structured fashion to record small amounts of machine-readable data into the DNS. Background A domain may have multiple TXT records associated with it, provided the DNS server implementation supports this. Each record can in turn have one or more character strings. Traditionally these text fields were used for a variety of non-standardised uses, such as a full company or organisation name, or the address of a host. In 1993 RFC 1464 proposed a simple approach to storing attributes and their values in these text fields. This is now used extensively in: Verification of domain ownership Implementation of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) records for verifying the sender of email messages Zero-configuration networking DNS-based service discovery Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) policies Using TXT records to store data for different purposes is not without problems. The DNS protocol specifies that when a client queries for a specific record type (e.g., TXT) for a certain domain name (e.g., example.com), all records of that type must be returned in the same DNS message. That may lead to large transactions with lots of "unnecessary" information being transferred and/or uncertainty about which TXT record to use. There are two ways around this: to specify a domain name prefix to be used when using TXT records for a specific purpose (e.g., _domainkey.example.com – in the DKIM case) or to create a new record type entirely. The former is "easy" because it doesn't require any changes to the DNS. The latter is sometimes considered "cleaner" as it matches the design of the DNS database model better. In the past, creating new record types was often avoided since it was a complicated procedure in the IETF. The reluctance lingers with some people despite the process having been replaced by a much lighter and quicker one. Format The structure of the TXT record is specified in as follows. Note that the specification is silent on the subject of character encoding of the text string. It explicitly states that the interpretation of the string is context dependent, and