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Installing Mail Certificates on Mac OS X

When sending and collecting mail, it is advisable to use encryption. But if your provider doesn't have a commercial certificate, Apple's Mail.app will ask you each time whether to accept it, or not. To get rid of that message you need to install the certificate locally. Here's how.

Quit Mail.app and start it again. It will then present you with a dialogue like the following:

Unable to connect

Click on the Show Certificate Button and the dialog will expand to reveal somehting like this:

Unable to connect

Notice the blue icon. It represents the file containing the certificate. This is what we need to install. In order to aquire the file you need to drag it from the dialog, i.e. to your desktop.

You must press and hold the alt-key before klicking onto the icon (or else Mail.app might hang and you will need to force-quit it)

Attention: Currently (i.e. up to and including Mac OS X 10.3.5) you must hurry with this operation! Due to a bug Mail.app will crash if you wait too long (i.e. more than a couple of seconds) before dragging. If that happens, switch to another application (i.e. the Finder), press Command-Alt-Esc and force-quit Mail.app.

After performing the drag-operation you should get a file something like this one:

Unable to connect

Double-click it. OS X will launch the Keychain Access Application and present you with the following choice of where to install the certificate. Choose X509 Anchors:

Unable to connect

You will have to enter your password (provided that you are a member of wheel)

Voila! That's it! Click on Continue in the Mail.app dialog for one last time and you're set ;-)

Outdated Information
Please note that most of the information contained in this section is several years old and while most of it is still useful, hardly none of it applies directly to current versions of the software discussed. Proceed with caution, your mileage may vary etc. pp. ;-)