Cannot digitally sign or encrypt emails after updating to TBird 60.4.0
Clicking on 'Help' | 'Troubleshooting Information' confirms that my Thunderbird program was successfully updated to version 60.4.0 on Jan 1st, 2019. However, since that update, I have been unable to digitally sign or encrypt emails. When I try to send a digitally signed email I get this message :
"Sending of the message failed You specified that this message should be digitally signed, but the application either failed to find the signing certificate specified in your Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings, or the certificate has expired."
However, when I click on Tools | Account Settings | Security | Manage Certificates, I see that I do have a certificate which expires on 20 June 2019, so I'm puzzled as to why this problem has suddenly appeared.
I'm not at all experienced in this sort of stuff so any easy-to-understand help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
All Replies (10)
Who issued the certificate. Symantec and it's subsidiaries are no longer trusted for that purpose.
It was issued by Comodo. I've never had any problem until the latest TBird update on Jan 1st.
However, when I click on Tools | Account Settings | Security | Manage Certificates, I see that I do have a certificate which expires on 20 June 2019
Try to re-select the desired cert in your Account Settings.
Thanks for the suggestion. Still no good.
I've now carried out the following in an attempt to solve this problem :
1) Backed up valid certificate and then deleted it from Thunderbird 2) Backed up all email data using MozBackup 3) Deleted Thunderbird using IOBit uninstaller 4) Re-installed the latest version of Thunderbird 5) Reboot PC 6) Transferred all saved email data back into Thunderbird 7) Imported certificate
- but I still get the same error message when I try to digitally sign an email :
"Sending of the message failed You specified that this message should be digitally signed, but the application either failed to find the signing certificate specified in your Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings, or the certificate has expired."
The certificate has not expired so, somehow, it seems Thunderbird is failing to find the certificate. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to proceed ? I'm thinking I'm missing something very obvious ... but what ?
Is this a free comodo certificate? Has it been revoked? My understanding is Thunderbird will check with comodo before using a certificate to ensure it is valid.
Thanks for your reply, Matt.
The certificate is free, from Sectigo (formerly Comodo). The certificate has not been revoked. In my 'Certificate Manager' it is listed with an expiry date of 17 Jan 2020.
In Account Settings | Security, the same certificate is specified under 'Digital Signing' and 'Security'.
I got that error when I used the wrong certificate for the wrong mail account. I also got it when I used a normal SSL certificate for mail signing, something it was not issued to do.
Okay, thanks for that Matt. I'll investigate when I have more time and report back.
Problem resolved. I revoked the old certificate, applied for a new one, installed it and everything is back to normal. It's a mystery why the old certificate suddenly stop working immediately after the TBird update. Thanks for those who helped.