Update Secure Certificate for Mail (Identification and Encryption)

Question

Hello...
Can you help?
I have several email addresses; all of which have valid secure certificates (stored by default automatically in Key Chain).
Whereas previously the certificates did not feature my name, new ones have been issued which do.
So... my question is as follows:
How do I point Mail to use the new certificates that have my name engrained within, opposed to the older ones which do not?
Thank you, in advance.
A

Answer 1

Hi ... I have been struggling with exactly this point, too. Try out the new Leopard feature called "New preferred Identity". For this open keychain, go to my certificates and control-click on each certificate individually as choose "new preferred identity". Here you can type the e-mail address and choose one of your certificates to be used "preferably". This is the official Apple way of doing it and you may read further information in the support section. Please let me know if it works with you!
In any case, it hasn't worked for me. I had to delete all old certificates for the same e-mail address and keep only the most recent one with my real-life name in it (you can delete right in keychain). After restart mail.app only uses the new certificate for signing e-mails.
You would expect that deleting the old certificate destroys your ability to read the older encrypted e-mails. But the good news is that everytime you open an e-mail with your old certificate mail.app will add the old certificate back to keychain and you can again read your encrypted e-mails which used the 'public' key from the old certificate. Although mail.app will add the old certificates again it will continue to use the new certificate. I call this a work-around because really the "new identity preference" should have worked.
I hope I helped you.
Valentin.