Nelson B Bolyard wrote:
> On 2010-02-18 03:06 PST, Michael Ströder wrote:
> 
>> I'm using Seamonkey 2.0.3 under Linux. Is there a way to list and tweak the
>> cached S/MIME capabilities for certain recipients?
> 
> There is no way to list them, at present.  There could be.  It just doesn't
> exist.  As for "tweaking" them, they get tweaked each time you receive a new
> signed email message from your correspondent.  If your correspondent gets
> new capabilities, and sends you a new signed email message, that message
> should near his new capabilities, and when you read it, your DB's record of
> that correspondent's capabilities should be updated.

Glad that the capabilities gets automatically updated.

> Mozilla email (whether SeaMonkey or Thunderbird) will use the strongest
> ciphers mutually supported, so there should be no need to tweak anything
> manually.

Still I'd like to see the possibility to

1. see the chiper used for a S/MIME message (similar to what's displayed for 
SSL)

2. explicitly exclude ciphers from the S/MIME capabilities my own MUA sends.

> The design of S/MIME caps is intended to have the effect that you NEVER send
> an encrypted message to a correspondent without evidence that the
> correspondent will be able to decrypt it.  This largely avoids the problem
> of sending an encrypted message to a correspondent that he cannot decrypt.

Well, but my local security policy could be to prefer avoiding to send a
message with a weak cipher.

> In all the years that Mozilla email products have supported encrypted email,
> we've had VERY few complaints of that nature (I couldn't decrypt the email
> someone sent me), and in those few cases where we did, it was because
> users had multiple installations (usually on multiple systems) of their
> email software, but only had their private key on one of the systems.
> Problems of receiving an email that was encrypted with an algorithm
> unsupported by the recipient have been non-existent, just as it should be.

Yes, that's also my experience. But sometimes I'd prefer to have a stricter
local config excluding weak ciphers risking that the message receivers cannot
decrypt it.

Ciao, Michael.

-- 
Michael Ströder
E-Mail: mich...@stroeder.com
http://www.stroeder.com
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