Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Creating a Personal Secure Certificate for Encrypted Email
- Thread starter ingenious
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Tex-Twil
macrumors 68030
Hi,
if you want to encrypt an email you send to someone else, you need his certificate.
If you want that people encrypt email they send to you, in this case they need your certificate.
A certificate is issued by a Certification Authority. You can also generate a self signed certificate but in this case it will not be trusted by other people, hence useless unless you need it for testing 😉
Tex
if you want to encrypt an email you send to someone else, you need his certificate.
If you want that people encrypt email they send to you, in this case they need your certificate.
A certificate is issued by a Certification Authority. You can also generate a self signed certificate but in this case it will not be trusted by other people, hence useless unless you need it for testing 😉
Tex
electroshock
macrumors 6502a
Depends on type of encryption. If you want S/MIME (which is more common) to encrypt your outgoing emails, then Verisign sells them for $19.95/year:
http://www.verisign.com/authentication/individual-authentication/digital-id/
Works well with just about all major mail clients I've used on Macs/Windows/Linux for the past 10+ years. There are other certificate authorities that sells similar products but I'm only personally familiar with Verisign's offerings.
If you want PGP certificates, you'll probably need to install a plug-in for it and generate a new key and then register it at a public keyserver (or give out to people you'd send encrypted emails to). Much less common.
If you want to encrypt your stored email messages for your own viewing rather than when emailing a message to someone else, then you might want to either use FileVault or get a commercial PGP software that does file/folder/volume encryption.
Nugget
macrumors 68020
You can get the same thing from Thawte for free.
http://www.thawte.com/secure-email/personal-email-certificates/
http://www.thawte.com/secure-email/personal-email-certificates/
Tex-Twil
macrumors 68030
Where is the option in Mail to s/mime sign/encrypt an email ? I've never found that 🙁
I do have my key pair and other people's certificates in the key chain but I just can't see the option.
Tex
Nugget
macrumors 68020
You can confirm whether or not OS X recognizes your key and other people's certs by looking at the email addresses in Address Book:
The little checked seals indicate the presence of a matching certificate in your keychain.
Then, if that's all solid, in email you should see two new icons when sending an email from an address which has a valid certificate:
See the two new buttons next to the signature selector? If you have a valid certificate for yourself the right side button will be enabled and allows you to choose to sign your email or not.
If your recipient has a valid certificate, the left side button will be enabled and allows you to choose to encrypt the email or not.