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rhodge
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Posted: 03 January 2007 at 3:26pm | IP Logged Quote rhodge

My company is looking into adding ssl capabilities into our vb6 programs. Our programs our run on servers that we do not control and we are wondering if we have ssl setup to run through the program what will happen under the following conditions:

1) The server running our program does not have an ssl server running.

2) The server running our program does not have a ssl certificate.

3) If the server running our program does not have any of the above would the email still be encrypted or not.

4) Programmatically if the above causes problems how hard would it be to switch between standard smtp and ssl.

I think that is it for now and I appreciate any help you can provide.
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Alex
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Posted: 04 January 2007 at 6:48am | IP Logged Quote Alex

What kind of vb6 program you're going to ssl-enable? MailBee SSL/SMIME plugin is an addon to MailBee Objects. Thus, it makes sense only for applications which communicate with mail servers using MailBee Objects to also enable communications with SSL-enabled mail servers.

From your description, it's not clear if your vb6 app is a mail client (from the mail server's point of view) or not. Could you please clarify this?

Regards,
Alex
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rhodge
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Posted: 04 January 2007 at 9:07am | IP Logged Quote rhodge

We run a database program through a remote rts session. So basically a person will log into the server and then do their work. We recently ran into a problem where people had to generate a report and then have access to the report or the underlying spread sheet. Because of the nature of the servers the people using the software do not have access to the file system. So we decided to start emailing the information to them which we have been able to successfully do with the smtp portion of the MaillBee product. However because of the confidential nature of the information that is being transmitted we have come to discover that these email should be encrypted in some fashion.

Most of the companies and organiztions that use are product are either not-for-profits or are county run. So some of them will be set up for ssl capabilities and others will not be.

I guess what we really are trying to figure out is how we can go about encrypting these emails. We are fairly new to ssl in its entirety. So maybe I am just thinking about this in the wrong way.
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Alex
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Posted: 04 January 2007 at 9:51am | IP Logged Quote Alex

OK, I got the clue. You wish to send encrypted mail to your clients. The common way for this is using S/MIME. SSL is for establishing secure connection with the mail server only (i.e. transmitting unsecured content over secure channel). However, many servers do no support SSL and this is not very reliable.

S/MIME, on other hand, is encrypting messages themselves. Messages then can be transmitted over non-secure channel without any risk of disclosure. To make S/MIME work, your clients should have certificates which can be used to decrypt messages. The client owns a private certificate (not for disclosure). Also, the client has public certificate which can be sent to anyone (for instance, to you). You can then encrypt a message with this public certificate and send it to the client. You cannot (and noone can), however, decrypt the message using the public certificate. Only the owner of the private certificate can.

Unlike SSL, which requires mail server support, S/MIME and its certificates is completely client-side thing. They widely used with mail client nowdays, including Outlook and Thunderbird. Many companies like VeriSign issue certificates for personal and corporate use.

MailBee SSL/SMIME plugin can do SMIME as well as SSL.

Regards,
Alex
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