Since Gmail allegedly supports S/MIME now, and Mac and iOS Mail have for ages, I thought I'd buy a certificate and try using it to see how people reacted.
Got through the sales process, and it turned out the CA hadn't updated its site in years and it only worked with either (a) Internet Explorer or (b) Firefox 68 or earlier, neither of which will run on my Mac for obvious reasons.
So, refund for that, and does anyone know of a CA that sells S/MIME certificates cheaply, that doesn't require that you own the entire domain, and that has a web site that works?
@mathew
My first thought was "is this being provided by LetsEncrypt?"
And it has been discussed on their Community Support forums, many times.
Here is a thread from about a year ago:
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/reconsider-s-mime/175504
@dec23k @mathew Yeah, I really wish they (or some similar organization) would start offering certs and perhaps make using S/MIME a more viable alternative for personal use. It's absurd that email encryption is still totally dysfunctional, given that practically everything else incorporates encryption at this point and I was successfully using encrypted email with OpenPGP like 20 years ago! The problem, of course, was that the web of trust model didn't really scale (for users who weren't cipherpunks), but maybe if S/MIME certs were easy to get it could actually get some traction (outside of large organizations).
