I received a rather weird e-mail, it seems to have been generated by an MTA because it was sent to the e-mail listed as the contact in my certificate, the e-mail listed in whois for my domain, and the postmaster e-mail.

It claims:

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Only certificate usages DANE-TA(2) and DANE-EE(3) are supported
with SMTP.  See:


https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-smtp-with-dane-19#section-3.1.3
---

The certificate is a 1 0 1 and not a 3 0 1

It seems to suggest that I change the TLSA record to 3 0 1

-=-=-

I get that other SMTP servers shouldn't be expected to do CA validation, but should one really mis-identify a CA signed cert as self-signed just because the other MTAs are not going to be able to validate it?

It seems more logical to me that if an MTA is using DANE validation and encounters a certificate with a 0 or 1 that it treat the certificate as if it was a 2 or 3 rather than asking the other MTA to mis-identify the certificate.

A certificate has to be used for TLS communication, whether it is self-signed or not doesn't matter - the TLSA fingerprint can still be validated whether it is a 1 0 1 or 3 0 1 TLSA entry.

So why would an IETF draft suggest that they shouldn't be used?

It seems logical to me that if two parties are communicating via TLS and one of the parties is using DANE to validate but is not doing CA validation, that it should treat 1 x x the same as 3 x x and 0 x x the same as 2 x x.

Expecting administrators with signed certificates to break the RFC for DANE just because some (all?) MTAs will not check with a CA seems bad.

What am I missing?

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