Re: [Djigzo users] prerequisite for encryption

Hi, I had several discussions with other vendors of mail encryption gateways and all told me that I'm wrong. But today Ciphermail did some thing I've predicted and proved that I was right. This is what I think, please correct me if I'm wrong: For me s/Mime (like PGP) is a encryption system based on public and private keys. If some one has access to the public key he can encrypt some thing which only can be decrypted with the private key. So, when some one sends an s/Mime signed mail to me I should be able to send a encrypted mail to him even if I do not have a s/Mime certificate for my e-mail address on my system. Exactly this happened on my site with Ciphermail. I have a s/Mime certificate for my e-mail addresses imported in Ciphermail and some one else sent a signed mail to me. With this mail Ciphermail stored the public key of the third party. When I mail to him Ciphermail does what I would expect and encrypts the mails. Yesterday a other mail user of my site which has no certificate in Ciphermail received a mail from exact the same person and replied. The reply got encrypted by Chiphermail despite the sender has no certificate imported to Chiphermail. This was what I would expect to happen. Bravo Ciphermail! :-) And thank you Ciphermail! You proved me right! I had a discussion with the support of an other encryption gateway and asked them, why mail sent to me from the other site got not encrypted despite the system recorded my signature with my public key. They told me that the mail do not get encrypted because the *sender* does not have a certificate imported to their system and that it is impossible to send s/Mime encrypted mails without a certificate for the *sender*.