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Can anyone suggest a webmail provider (like gmail, Yahoo mail, hotmail, etc.) that supports S/MIME encrypted email well? Both sending and receiving email and obviously keeping track of the encryption keys for contacts.

I haven't found one yet that appears to support S/MIME and I'm thinking a hosted Exchange account might be my only option. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Scott Bussinger
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I've found the Gmail S/MIME plugin to work just great. Yes, it requires you to use Firefox with a plugin, but if that's not a big deal, it should work fine for you.

Additionally, S/MIME is really a client-side thing. You could use Thunderbird (or any other decent MUA) with any of these services and be able to send and receive S/MIME messages just fine.

EEAA
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  • Interesting -- I hadn't realized it was a client side process. In experimenting, you're correct that it's possible to use someone like Yahoo for encrypted emails. You're limited in that you can't read them online and if you forward an encrypted message the email is effectively destroyed, but if you stick to local mail clients it does work. – Scott Bussinger Aug 01 '10 at 19:10
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I'm not sure you'll find any public ones, since decryption/encryption uses too much CPU and storing private keys in a public service isn't good thing to do. Hosted Exchange will be the best.