Assurance

["Joe St Sauver" <>]

<>
 commented:

#This has been a point of frustration with Gmail for years... as far as I 
#know, they still don't support S/MIME. 

End-to-end encryption dramatically reduces Gmail's ability to target
relevant ads at users, and since they live and die on their advertising
revenues, well, there you go.

Abd from a user's POV, I also wouldn't want my email provider to have access
to my private key, anyhow, right? 

That said, there are solutions that will let you do S/MIME with Gmail:

-- You can try Penango, see http://www.penango.com/ (caution: licensing
   required for some types of deployments, and note that when the browser
   updates, there may be a relatively brief lag while Penango gets rev'd
   for compatability with the new version)

-- Gmail also allows users to use IMAP, see
   http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77695
   so you can also use any IMAP client that has good integrated S/MIME
   support (Thunderbird should work fine, for example)

If you're interested, feel free to check out my death march through client
certificates (from a Security Professionals 2012 preconference seminar),
http://pages.uoregon.edu/joe/secprof2012/sec-prof-2012-client-certs.pdf

Don't hesitate to drop me a note if you have any questions,

Regards,

Joe