I need to connect to a website that uses the Outlook Web Access (OWA) where I have emails waiting for me that are encrypted with S/MIME.
Have I understood it correctly the Firefox does not support S/MIME (that’s what the message says). Which, if any, web browser on the OpenSUSE platform does support S/MIME?
(Similarly, my Evolution mail program, connected to the above OWA site using the EWS plugin refuses to decrypt or encrypt S/MIME mails although, I believe I have the right certificate and private key. But I think this is a different problem)
Normally, one would use an email client for S/MIME. So I’m not surprised that firefox can’t handle it. In that case, the email client is the web server that firefox is connected to.
It is more surprising that Evolution cannot handle this. Something is probably misconfigured somewhere.
My understanding is that emails cannot be stored using S/MIME, S/MIME is a <method> for <transferring> with encryption and only to trusted recipients. S/MIME requires setting up the clients ahead of time, exchanging “secrets” to encrypt/decrypt, you can’t just willy-nilly use any mail client without exchanging those secrets.
But, when you’re talking about using a web browser like Firefox, you can’t and don’t use S/MIME because you’re not transferring mail.
When you use a web browser, you’re viewing your mail on the server and typically over an SSL/TLS connection for security.
So, first step is whether you’re viewing your emails using OWA and not running some mail client like Thunderbird.
Checking the requirements for Office 365, it looks like any current, up to date version of Firefox should be fully supported.
If you’re having problems connecting, you should provide detailed information about what the error is and how it’s displayed.
An S/MIME encrypted email was sent from an account on an OWA server to my account on the same server. I want to view it from home using Firefox via OWA connection (i.e. Webmail). The mail message in OWA says “S/MIME wird vom Browser bzw. der Plattform aktuell nicht unterstützt.” (translated: S/MIME is not supported currently by the browser or platform). That’s the reason for my question.
(I would prefer to read the encrypted mail with my Evolution client, but, as you suggest, my certificate / private key configuration for S/MIME decryption / encryption
is obviously shaky)
Now that I have got S/MIME working (for signing and encrypting mails) using the Evolution client to / from the OWA server. However, I have several S/MIME-encrypted mails on the server that cannot be read using the Firefox browser but can (now) be read using the Evolution client. So is it a problem of browser configuration or is it just fundamentally not possible with Firefox?
Like in another thread and like explained above already: Firefox (or any other HTML browser) is NOT an e-mail client/program. It can only show (render) to you pages it loads from a HTTP server. The contents of that page is made by the server.
Now there are servers that have a mail program included. That is in other words a program that runs on a system somewhere and that programs what it wants to show (e-mails, inbox listings, whatever a mail program features) in HTML and sends it down the line to your HTML browser. So called Web Mail.
But it depends fully on that remote program what features is has and how it shows it to you. Firefox (or any other browser) has no saying in this. It only shows web pages and uploads input that that web pages allow you to do.