I learned quite a bit on digital signatures this weekend.I also generated a free email signing certificate from http://www.cacert.org .It is community driven non-profit organization running out of Australia.
After reading a lot and experimenting i finally stumbled upon this article of how to use it in Outlook 2007.Be sure to read about it @ http://wiki.cacert.org/EmailCertificates
Then I finally was able to send my first digitally signed email :-).
Then I thought of using it a lot but came to know that if you send any signed emails to a webmail accounts like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc the end user gets an attachment(smime.p7m) with a blank body line.Now to open this attachment you will need to download a viewer for it from http://www.cryptigo.com/p7mViewer/

Overall after spending about 12-14 hours reading about it and experimenting about it I feel that it is too difficult for average used to use Digital signatures.
The idea is great and we should use it but i believe the learning curve for people is going to be huge and it will take sometime before people actually start using it.

posted at: 22:33 | category: /cuttingedge | permanent link to this entry