A poster on macOSXHints has posted a tip to reduce the long delays in producing a reply window that sometimes occur in Mail.

He suggests that it caused by settings in the Keychain and provides a work-around to fix it.

I had this problem earlier in the year. In my case, it wasn’t caused by Keychain settings, but by my .Mac account.

I won’t repeat it all here, but you can read the whole saga in “Apple Mail phones home too” where you will also find the fix.

In short, Mail was trying to connect through port 80 to verify my iChat certificate. My work firewall blocks port 80. Hence the delay.

Interesting that Mail phones home in an unannounced but benign way, don’t you think? mail.app, apple mail, dotmac, .Mac, iChat, certificate, keychain, bugs

As part of my steep learning curve about encrypted mail in Apple Mail I came across a howto on the O’Reilly mac devcenter, that explains the proccess for requesting a certificate from Thawte.

It says that you can’t use Safari to get your certificate. Probably you couldn’t when this howto was written in January 2004.

But you can now. I just did. There’s no option to select Safari from the browser options in Thawte’s request process, but selecting “Netspace Communicator or Messenger” works.

Then click on the URL in the email from Thawte announcing that your certificate has been issued. Safari will happily download it and automatically add it to your Keychain.

So spare yourself the hassle of mucking around with another browser.

You might also like to follow the guide recommended by Andreas Amann in the comments: http://www.joar.com/certificates/.