NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use

[Peter Gutmann]

Alex Alten <alex at alten.org> writes:

>What I really hated about it was that when fred at company.com sent me an email
>often I couldn't decrypt it.  Why?  Because his firm's email server decided
>to put in the FROM field "fred at server.company.com".  Since it didn't match
>the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME
>attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email.  It took us
>hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out
>the root of the problem.

Something's getting lost in this description.  What does the value in the
"From" field have to do with you decrypting a message?  OTOH the mention of an
"attachment" indicates a detached S/MIME signature, which doesn't have
anything to do with encryption.  If it is a signature, then the software
should verify it with the included cert and display that as the signer.

Please correct and resubmit.

Peter.


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