How do you enable PGP encryption in Panther Mail? - Page 2

**Captain Code** · #9 October 13th, 2003, 10:16 AM

How do you request a certificate? None of the browsers I've tried will work on the Mac: Safari 1.1, IE Mac, Camino.

IE on a PC will work.

Dalbot · #10 October 13th, 2003, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Captain Code
How do you request a certificate? None of the browsers I've tried will work on the Mac: Safari 1.1, IE Mac, Camino.

IE on a PC will work.

Only Mozilla worked for me and I had to add the certificate to Mozilla's security preferences. It then becomes available for use with Mozilla's mail module. After that, I sent myself a signed email. Mail app recognized the signed certificate, but I still couldn't get encryption to work.

I've given up for the time being. I'm going to wait until Panther ships. Hopefully someone over at O'Reilly.com will write a tutorial about using Mail's encryption scheme, which, if you ask me, is not very impressive. They should've just built-in a PGP-like encryption scheme that you enable via preferences.

smatchy · #11 October 13th, 2003, 02:20 PM

I got my certificate from thawte, too. You have to export it from Mozilla (via preferences -> security -> cerfiticates -> backup) to your harddisk. You will be ask for your password(s). This should give a file with suffix ".p12". Then import the file to the program Keychain. Now you should able to encrypt and sign messages with the mailaccount that matches the mailadress from the certificate. Works for me! I'm only wondering: how trusty is thawte.com? I mean, they're advertising with a head-tattooed tattooer!

**Captain Code** · #12 October 14th, 2003, 07:14 AM

That sucks that I have to use Mozilla. I deleted it cause it took too long to start up on my computer.

Well, I'll give it a try, thanks.

I agree that that's not a really easy way to use encryption in Mail. They should have a preference setting and allow you to import certs. Or at least open the keychain and tell you to import them that way.

Maybe in the next release they'll make it a bit better.

scruffy · #13 October 14th, 2003, 11:29 AM

Really, who the heck uses X.509 certs anyway (OK, not many people use PGP, but more than use S/MIME with X.509). I'm surprised they wouldn't at least integrate GPG.

Makes sense they wouldn't use PGP though, that's now commercial software...

cybergoober · #14 October 14th, 2003, 02:21 PM

The Apple rep that was here a few weeks ago kept mentioning VeriSign certificates and how they worked with Mail.app under Panther… probably something you have to buy, though. I thought I remembered him mentioning something about GPG compatibility, but I could be wrong…