Hi Sebastian,

> I think SPF / DKIM is more of a suitable method of verifying authenticity
> for mails, since these can be verifyed automatically by most email server
> software without any plugins.

For servers yes, but for email clients the opposite is true. Most clients 
already automatically verify S/MIME. DKIM could be done in the client but SPF 
is particularly hard to do in a client.

> Ergo, a CA **MUST** support SPF as validation method
[...]
> And a CA **MAY** also support DKIM

Why this strong preference for SPF over DKIM? 

SPF isn't compatible with regular email forwarding and thus creates a lot of 
problems. See for example https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/24/spf-dkim-dmarc/ 
for details. I recommend my customers to only use DKIM and not use SPF at all 
because of this.

> and/or SMIME as validation method both
> for sending

I think the main point here is if we want to force clients to support full 
MIME decoding including S/MIME or not. Making this decision a MAY isn't good 
practice, as an ACME client without a full MIME parser will just stop to work 
once the CA decides to activate S/MIME. Also mail filtering gateways then 
can't rely on the kind of signing a CA does on the challenge mails.

> For gateway filtering, I suggest that a couple of static adresses is
> reserved for this purpose:
> acme @ [ca_domain_name].[tld]

yes, good idea.

Kind regards,

Gerd



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