Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

Uff that was tough one … If you decided to make your mail communications more secure you probably switched on SSL option in your mail client for POP3/IMAP/SMTP servers. There is a good chance you will get one of those errors that sound like

The server you are connected to is using a security certificare that could not be verified.
A certificate chain processed, but terminated in a root certificate which is not trusted by the trust provider.
Do you want to continue using this server?

I spent way too much time solving the problem because what was just annoying message in Outlook appeared to be serious problem in MacMail. It was not capable of working correctly with that problem. In addition to that I tried to solve the problem using Plesk 8.2 that was a mistake. It appeared that whatever you do with certificates in Plesk that doesn’t affect the mail. So here is the solution for the problem:

Despite the process of obtaining an SSL certificate for your website is not very difficult it may take you plenty of time, because the price of mistake could be rather high. I’d say you can loose hundreds of dollars if you buy wrong type of certificate or get it from wrong place. Here’s a quick overview of the process that will make your SSL cert shopping experience more enjoyable.