Problem with outgoing e-mail due to Verisign Digital Certificate

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Background: We are required to send signed & encrypted e-mails over internet. We are on notes mail and the other party uses MS Exchange. Hence we are using Verisign’s digital certificate to encrypt e-mails.

We imported the certificate to our notes id and sent a signed email to other party so that they could include it and such established a secure email communication. Worked perfectly fine

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Problem:

Since last few days, when we send an text attachment thru e-mail, the other party gets it with an “equal (=)” character added at the end of the attachment. (This is a new problem, used to work fine previously)

What could be the reason?

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Some observations:

  1. We have recently upgraded to R6.51. But it used to work fine after that.

  2. Removing the verisign certificate resolves the problem

  3. With the certificate added to notes id, the problem persists irrespective of whether the email is signed/encrypted or not.

  4. The attachment in sent folder is fine with out any equal character at the end

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Any help will be greatly appreciated.

2

Subject: Problem with outgoing e-mail due to Verisign Digital Certificate

Hello,

do you mean with “at the end of the attachment” the file name (i.e. text.txt=) or within the attachment i.e. the contents - a = is added.

If it is the second case i can tell you where the = is probably coming from - its from the boundary of a multipart mail. SMIME mails are wrapped into 2 specific content types, either multipart/signed or application/pkcs7-signature.

Does this only happend to signed emails, or also to encrypted emails ?

Does it only happend with text files, or also binary attachments ?

You could do two things :

Verify if this problem is Outlook specific on the recipient side (i.e. do other clients also display the file wrong).

Try to change the SMIME settings in Notes (im not sure if this is possibile yet) if the problem is for signatures only - instead of creating clear signed messages, create opaque signed messages.

3

Subject: RE: Problem with outgoing e-mail due to Verisign Digital Certificate

Hi, your response is encouraging for me.You are true, the problem is within attachment.

  1. If I sign the message, my sent folder also shows the attachment with =

  2. If I do not sign then the attachment in my sent folder is fine but the other party receives with =

  3. The problem persists on Outlook as well as on web browser.

  4. I have so far tested only on ASCII text files. will try for binary files aswell.

  5. I have a PKCS certificate in my notes ID.

How do I create opaque signed message?

Thank you for your help