294704 - Certificates should associate with identities, not with acccounts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 252250

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Chris Owens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: 1.0.2 (20050317)

The Account Manager allows the user to associate a digital signing certificate
and an encryption certificate with each account (the "security" tab of the
"account settings" page.

If you have multiple identites under a single account, there is no way to
associate separate certificates with each identity, which is typically what you
want. 

For example, if you have mail addresses "[e-mail]" and "[e-mail]" both
forwarded to the same mailbox, you probably want a single account, with two
identities. You need to use a separate certificate with each e-mail address, but
there is no way to tell Thunderbird about that.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create an account
2.Create a second identity within that account
3.Associate a signing and encryption certificate with that account
4.Begin composing a message, "from" the second identity
5.Select "Sign this message" from the "security" menu item

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird complains (reasonably enough) that it doesn't have a certificate to
match the sender's address:  "In order to use this feature you must first set up
security certificates"

Expected Results:  
The object model or data model around accounts, identities, and certificates
needs to be examined and the UI possibly reworked so that certificates belong to
identities, not accounts.

Happy to discuss further.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

As noted at the dupe, this is possible if you're willing to edit the preferences 
file manually and figure out the cryptic identity settings.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 252250 ***