What are the benefits of using conforming certificates?

Posted by zneak on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by zneak
Published on 2011-01-30T06:35:33Z Indexed on 2011/01/30 7:27 UTC
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ssl

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certificate

Recently, my web host started sending my mail client a self-signed root certificate with no field filled (everything says "Unknown") when connecting via SSL. I'm pretty sure this is not a good thing, but since it works, the tech support guy says it's fine.

I'm not a certificate guru, so I'm turning to you people. What purpose do certificates serve? Is it really okay that the certificate has every field set to "Unknown"? I don't check certificates often, but I don't recall ever being sent a root one; what's the difference between a root certificate and, err, the other kind of certificate?

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