Digital signatures are encryption-based, secure stamp of authentication on a macro or document.This signature confirms that the macro or document originated from the signer and has not been altered. Digital IDs includes digital certificate (certificate: A digital means of proving your identity. When you send a digitally signed message you are sending your certificate and public key. Certificates are issued by a certification authority, and like a driver's license, can expire or be revoked. The key a sender gives to a recipient so that the recipient can verify the sender's signature and confirm that the message was not altered. Recipients also use the public key to encrypt (lock) email messages to the sender.), used to sign the contents of an Email message proves to the recipient that you are not an imposter.
Note: You must get a digital ID before you can digitally sign an email message.
In this article, I will guide you through various steps involved in signing Email messages and identify the validity of a signed message in in Outlook 2010.
How to ‘Digitally sign’ an Email message in Microsoft Outlook?
Note: You should purchase a Digital ID, from a trusted third party Certificate provider or get a Digital ID from your organization’s CA. You may go here, to find out some of the Digital ID providers. Copy the .pfx file to your computer before proceeding to the following steps:
The following steps are prepared in Outlook 2010 Professional.
Open Outlook 2010 and perform the following operations to include a Digital ID in outlook and send email using that:
This will evoke a window as shown below:
2. Under Encrypted e-mail section, select the Add digital signature to outgoing messages check box.
3. If available, you can select one of the followingoptions:
4. Now we want to import the Digital ID stored in your computer to the outlook system.
5. Now we want to choose the Digital ID for our email signing purposes
6. Accept the changes in the open windows by pressing ‘OK’ buttons. Now you will be able to use the Digital ID to sign the email send from the corresponding email address configured in your outlook application
7. You can see the following highlighted changes in the sent email as shown below:
8. The recipient can check the ‘digital signature’ of the email received, by clicking the right most security icon. Click there to get the following screen:
9. You may now ‘edit trust’, ‘View certificate details’ or ‘can trust the certification authority’ in the window.
Manu works as an Associate Consultant of IT Infrastructure division of UST Global in Technopark, Kerala India. Before working with UST Global, Manu was associated with different companies named as JDA Software Inc., RM PLC, Visionics (India), MNCs operated in IT Industry in maintaining their IT Infrastructure and Data Center resources.
The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager for Dynamics, Excel, Office 365, Platforms and SharePoint in the United States. She has been working with MVPs since her early days as Microsoft Exchange Support Engineer when MVPs would answer all the questions in the old newsgroups before she could get to them.
It's great to see an article at last on Using Digital IDs (Certificates) to prove the identity in Outlook. Not even found a proper documentation yet anywhere
Thanks a Lot, I was looking for this info on the google and your post is the best on this subject
Thank you for posting this
When the digital ID has been setup as above, is it possible to have the password for the ID asked for before an e-mailed is sent? Reason: to ensure that someone else does not send a digitally signed e-mail from you.