Where should I go to get a S/MIME certificate?

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_an_SMIME_certificate lists several places to get a free S/MIME certificate. Thawte no longer offers free S/MIME certificates. It used to be the one everybody recommended.

Startcom (StartSSL), Securio, CACERT and Comodo seem to be the only ones offering free class 1 certificates that are good for a year.

Which one do you recommend I get and why?

[tanstaafl]

The reason I'm asking is I signed up to help test the 3.1 beta and one of the sections I was given was "Digital signing, encrypting messages". The Litmus test for that says to use a free Thawte certificate.

What do most people use when their Thawte certificate expires?

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy tanstaafl,

a friend of mine pointed these ...
http://www.sslshopper.com/email-certifi ... cates.html
http://www.whichssl.com/comparisons/

... out to me some time ago. i never made use of any of it, so i dunno if it's meaningful for you. the only one he mentioned was comodo and he seemed unhappy with their professional products. he had no opinion on their free stuff, tho.

hope that helps,
lee

[tanstaafl]

Thanks. I also found http://tech.niques.info/choosing-free-d ... rtificate/ . I guess I'll try a couple and then update the Litmus test based on my experiences.

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy tanstaafl,

that's a nicely done page! thanks, dude. i'll add it to my horde of almost-never-used links. [*grin*]

take care,
lee

[tagore123]

Beep!

http://henrytodd.org/notes/2013/generat ... ith-smime/ summarizes the trust-problem "private keys". There does not seem to be any CA that signs a CRT that was created in a fully trustable local enviroment like verisign did years ago.

A growing number of CAs become resellers of comodo instead which seems to generate the keypair on the serverside while not working under a fully trustable legislature.

https://startssl.com still seems an alternative but encounters so heavy traffic these days that it becomes difficult to reach at all...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_an_SMIME_certificate still mentiones http://www.trustcenter.de/en/products/t ... icates.htm which was taken over by Symantec some time ago, who closes down the service by 2014.

[rsx11m]

Thanks for the additional information, but this thread here hasn't seen any action for four years now, hence locking. I've re-posted the paragraph on updating the KB article in viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2825891&p=13570511#p13570511 which is the dedicated Knowledge Base thread and thus comments on obsolete content of articles should be posted there.