Email problem with S/MIME certificate

[patty1]

I just got a note from an acquaintance with whom I only infrequently exchange email, saying that Apple Mail had alerted her that it was "unable to verify the authenticity of the S/MIME certificate provided by [my email address]." I had this come up with a friend several months ago but somehow we got a handle on it.

The email address in question is in my domain, which is hosted at Sonic. I'll try sending her a note from my @sonic.net email account and see whether that triggers the same alert, but I expect that it won't.

Anyone know how I can fix this certificate problem permanently?

[kgc]

Patty, any S/MIME certificate would be something that had been configured in your email client, perhaps by accident.

[patty1]

Hi, Kelsey.

Thank you, your information led me the right direction to find and fix the problem.

I don't know why, but one of my Macs did have digital signing activated. It took me longer to figure that out than it should have because, annoyingly, Apple's support pages don't have pictures of the icons they're describing. It turned out to be a tiny "seal" icon (a signature seal, not Lou Seal ) to the far right of the Subject field in Apple Mail that I could unclick. In case it helps anyone else, here's that icon selected and deselected:

Screenshot 2024-09-04 at 8.41.17 PM.png (9.25 KiB) Viewed 3563 times

Screenshot 2024-09-04 at 8.40.22 PM.png (9.11 KiB) Viewed 3563 times

I just sent test emails to another of my email addresses (non-Sonic) and the one I sent when the seal was active had an smime attachment whereas the one with it deactivated did not. So I think I can finally quit driving my friends crazy! I still don't know how the digital signing got turned on in the first place. On my MacBook, I don't even see that option when I create an email message, so I must have initially activated it on my iMac somewhere in some settings rather than within a message composition window. Oh well, I'm not going to bother figuring that out now that I know how to turn it off within Mail. (Once I turned it off, subsequent new messages also defaulted to it being inactive.)

Thanks again for the quick response! Yay Sonic!

[kgc]

Thanks again for the quick response! Yay Sonic!

You're welcome Patty.