DNS CNAME question

Which takes precedence?

[johnnie]

Hello,

For one of my domains, I'm installing google apps (specifically, Google mail). Now, I wonder, which of the following two rules will take precedence? Assume they are included in the zone file in this order:

mail IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
* IN CNAME <mydomain>

say, I wanted to hit mail.google.com, would the wildcard record take precedence and kick you to <mydomain> or would the mail CNAME record take precedence?

[encyclo]

I haven't tested this in practice, but my understanding is that a wildcard is supposed to match requests for non-existent names only, so in your example, the

mail

subdomain should be unaffected by the wildcard entry.

There's this RFC which explains it in full: [tools.ietf.org...]