Eudora : digital signing, encryption, old/new issues

Requirements
No matter which email solution you use, you will need a certificate. Comodo gives a free one. Alert! Chrome fails! Must use IE or Firefox with Comodo's system.  cacert.org also offers free email (and also free ssl certificates) BUT as of right now (December 2012) I have been unable to use them for email with Eudora.

The Comodo certificate is valid for one year.



You will need to export your certificate from the browser to a file on disk so that Eudora can load it.

Eudora Open Source Edition ("OSE")
Eudora OSE works well on Windows 7 64-bit. It has features for digital signing and encrypt/decrypt built-in, painless. You just set your default behavior for each account and override (by menu) when necessary.

Eudora 7.1
Eudora v7.1 .... not so good on Windows 7 64-bit.  Download free plug-in and readme from eudora.com/download/.  Definitely read the readme file ! ! !

If you get an error about the plug-in no longer working, look under options for viewing mail; you will have to disable the use of IE.  

You will also have to install and register CAPICOM from Microsoft.  The capicom.dll will be in the lib\x86 folder after you install. 

c:\Windows\system32\regsvr32.exe c:\Apps\Microsoft\CapicomSDK\Lib\x86\capicom.dll

All of the above is free.  But ...

With those in place, you can digitally sign emails from Eudora 7.1, you can verify signatures of emails that are signed by others, and you can encrypt your own outgoing messages.

What you cannot do is decrypt other people's emails unless you install some kind of p7mviewer that works off a command-line.  After several hours of searching, my conclusion is that there are only a few players left in the game, most notably Cryptigo, so if you want this feature, buy and use their Eudora S/MIME plug-in.  I have not tried this yet but probably it will work...

There are MANY MAJOR download sites including C|Net that advertise p7m and/or S/MIME viewers for Windows.  Many lead to 404 errors after much ignoring of advertisements.  Almost all  were written years ago for 32-bit Windows.  Some work only with the early standards, i.e. obsolete.  The ones that could work on modern Windows cost money - shareware.

If you want to write your own command line utility with OpenSSL libraries, go for it.  I did not get that far. 

Why not use just Eudora OSE?
1. Filters work better in Eudora 7. In particular, Eudora 7 can filter your outgoing messages and Eudora OSE cannot.  If you live and die by the power of your old filters, upgrading just is not an option.
2. File attachments are more annoying in OSE.  You have to carefully Save As the attachment, and then do it a second time to a location that you specify (or live with the default location).

What is great about OSE?
Aside from participating in the secure world, OSE also supports Unicode so messages (spam or otherwise) from China, Russia, Japan, etc etc will show the correct symbols instead of the gibberish that you see in 7.1.
Download OSE from mozilla.org.