TLS Certificate (Mail)

[haravikk]

I'm just curious, but in Lion's Mail there is a TLS Certificate available in the accounts pane in its preferences. Now, I know this is for encrypting mail.

There seems to be an included certificate in the form com.apple.idms.appleid.prd.<hash>
Where <hash> looks like some form of UUID.

Anyway, I'm wondering what kind of suitability this certificate has for personal use, and if I have multiple e-mail accounts, is it a good idea to use this certificate to start securing them all? Is it personally identifying, i.e - if someone received encrypted messages from e-mail address A and e-mail address B, both signed with the same certificate, can they tell that these two addresses are the same person?

I think that for e-mail to really become trusted again technologies like encryption and signing really do need to take off properly, so I'd like to start using them, but I have quite a few different e-mail accounts for different purposes, as I don't want to have to buy certificates for them all.

Anyway, I suppose I'm interested in a general sense about how people are using TLS certificates in Mail?

 

[cschmelz]

I'm just curious, but in Lion's Mail there is a TLS Certificate available in the accounts pane in its preferences. Now, I know this is for encrypting mail.

There seems to be an included certificate in the form com.apple.idms.appleid.prd.<hash>
Where <hash> looks like some form of UUID.

Anyway, I'm wondering what kind of suitability this certificate has for personal use, and if I have multiple e-mail accounts, is it a good idea to use this certificate to start securing them all? Is it personally identifying, i.e - if someone received encrypted messages from e-mail address A and e-mail address B, both signed with the same certificate, can they tell that these two addresses are the same person?

I think that for e-mail to really become trusted again technologies like encryption and signing really do need to take off properly, so I'd like to start using them, but I have quite a few different e-mail accounts for different purposes, as I don't want to have to buy certificates for them all.

Anyway, I suppose I'm interested in a general sense about how people are using TLS certificates in Mail?

I bought one for my main account (my AppleID account) from Verisign...It is only $20/year.

 

[neurophysicist]

I was also wondering about this default certificate that has "com.apple.idms....". Does it provide any security benefit by selecting this for all mail accounts over selecting nothing at all, or do we have to purchase a certificate to use for multiple emails?

I don't know anything about TLS and certificates, other than its used for encrypting email. In addition to the default certificate in the drop down menu I also have one for my name (which I believe is from my school email gmail account). Can this certificate (or any certificates for that matter) be used for multiple emails? I don't know much about this topic, but I am interested in learning how to provide better security for my email. Thanks.