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Enigmail and S/MIME

2018-04-19
2019-03-25
  • Karl Ratzsch

    Karl Ratzsch - 2018-04-19

    I've seen the two other recent threads about enigmail and S/MIME, not sure how this fits in:

    I want to solely use S/MIME in one account and enigmail in another. However enigmail always removes the S/MIME buttons in the composer window, and replaces it with it's own buttons. They work for S/MIME also, which is fine, but encryption always gets enabled by default as soon as I type in address with known certificate, although I've disabled S/MIME encryption in the account settings.

    (enigmail 2.0.2 / TB 52.7.0)

     
  • Patrick Brunschwig

    That's correct. The sign and encrypt buttons now also work for S/MIME. If you check the Enigmail menu, you should see that the protocol is set to "S/MIME" in this case.

    In other words, Enigmail tries to enable encryption whenever possible, and with whichever protocol works - S/MIME or OpenPGP.

     
    • Karl Ratzsch

      Karl Ratzsch - 2018-04-20

      But shouldn't enigmail honour my default settings? Just saying ... ;-)

      Not everybody I email has his certificates correctly set up on all his devices.

       
      • Patrick Brunschwig

        Yes, that's what Enigmail tries to do. You activated the option "encrypt if possible" (the default) which does what it says.

         
  • Franco Pecoraro

    Franco Pecoraro - 2019-03-25

    Hi,
    I successfully imported the Root, Intermediate (into the Certification authorities tab) and personal certificates of an account (Trusted people tab) of my Thunderbird certificate store.
    This account uses X.509 certificates and S/MIME.
    Then, I created an X.509 self signed certificate with xCA and imported it into my Personal certificates tab of the Thunderbird certificate store.
    When I try to use Enigmail to send encrypted emails to such recipient, I choose Prefer S/MIME into Enigmail configuration but Enigmail displays that it doesn't find the certificate.
    The test works fine using OpenPGP certificate to send an encrypted email to my own Gmail mailbox.

    So far I successfully sent encrypted emails to S/MIME recipients was using the FossaMe extension of Google Chrome but I would prefer using Enigmail if it worked with S/MIME.
    Any help is welcome.
    Thanks
    Regards

     
  • Patrick Brunschwig

    S/MIME is builtin in Thunderbird - Enigmail does not "work" with S/MIME. All that Enigmail does is to choose the S/MIME algorithm if Thunderbird says that S/MIME is available. If you want to be sure that S/MIME is working corrctly, then I'd start with disabling Enigmail, and making sure that S/MIME is correctly set up and working. After that's OK, you can enable Enigmail and let it decide if S/MIME or OpenPGP should be used.

     

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