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How to view smime.p7m email attachments
Authored by: ecovelli on May 23, '07 10:34:48AM
It is just a matter of adding the certificate and using any of the modern email clients. Here are instructions from MacTechnologies:

E-mail is many things, but, unfortunately, "safe" is not one of them.

There is an old saw that you should never send something in e-mail that you
would mind seeing on the front page of the New York Times, and that's as
true today as it was when e-mail first became popular in the 90's. E-mail
(and, in fact, all Internet traffic) travels through many servers between
your computer and its final destination, all belonging to strangers. And
while it's true that the sheer volume of e-mail that travels the 'net these
days is probably enough to keep yours safe even if someone does care enough
to snoop, I still wouldn't send a credit card number or the PIN for my ATM
card through e-mail.

This is a long-standing problem that has yet to be fully addressed by
standards, but there is a solution, albeit one that requires you and your
e-mail partner to take some steps. You can get a free digital certificate
that will allow you to digitally "sign" your e-mails and allow others to
send you encrypted e-mail. You can also send encrypted e-mail to anyone who
sends their certificate to you.

This all sounds more complicated than it is. Basically, the steps are to
sign up for a certificate, install that certificate (handled automatically
for you by the Mac), then start using it. If someone sends you their
certificate in e-mail, you simply have to tell your e-mail program to save
it (again, handled automatically if you use Mail, and requiring one step if
you use Entourage).

You can get a free certificate from a company called Thawte
(http://www.thawte.com) and can find the complete instructions (and what is
probably a better explanation than the one I just provided) here:

<http://tinyurl.com/yxz7rj>;

The direct page for the free e-mail certificate is here:

<http://tinyurl.com/9atq7>;

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