Simplifying Secure Comms with Updates to S/MIME and PGP

Encryption Features   PGP & S/MIME    | May 27, 2025

Managing secure email often feels like walking a tightrope between reliability, efficiency, and compliance.

For businesses heavily reliant on certificate-based encryption, like S/MIME and PGP, the stakes are especially high. Missed encryption opportunities, frustrating search processes for certificates, and failed key exchanges are common pain points that can slow down teams and create costly inefficiencies.

Good news for security professionals, though. With our latest updates to S/MIME and PGP workflows, managing encryption just became a whole lot simpler. This post explores these updates, breaks down the pain points they address, and dives into how they make secure communication faster, easier, and more reliable.

Pain Points in Encryption Management

Encryption is essential for safeguarding information, especially in regulated industries or regions, such as the DACH area, where S/MIME and PGP are widely used. While necessary, the processes behind encryption pose challenges that have long plagued technical teams:

• Missed encrypted emails lead to communication breakdowns.
• Disruptive certificate discovery and management processes chew up valuable time.
• Temporary outages and failures in key exchanges interrupt workflows, creating frustration.
• Complexity at scale makes centralized management a daunting task.

These problems don’t just create hassle; they waste time, money, and productivity. That’s why we’ve focused on delivering solutions tailored to these specific pain points, as identified by the professionals we spoke to in regions that lean heavily on S/MIME and PGP, like DACH.

Updates to S/MIME Workflows

S/MIME workflows deal primarily with the management and application of certificates for secure email communication. Our latest updates streamline these processes with practical enhancements that tackle inefficiencies head-on.

Improved Certificate Management

For enterprises, managing S/MIME certificates can create a significant administrative burden. To ease this, we’ve rolled out:

• CA Integration
  Now, enterprises can automatically generate S/MIME certificates on demand from a trusted Certificate Authority. This replaces manual workflows for outbound message signing, reducing admin time and ensuring constant certificate availability.
• Global LDAP Directory Publishing
  Searching for and managing certificates is far easier with this update. Public X.509 certificates are now published to the Echoworx Global LDAP Directory, eliminating delays once caused by manual certificate searches.
• Retry Mechanisms for Certificate Requests
  Network hiccups and outages shouldn’t bring encryption operations to a standstill. With retry mechanisms in place, failed certificate requests will automatically retry in the background, ensuring workflows operate smoothly even when external conditions aren’t ideal.
• Credential Handling Optimized for Complex Environment
  Updates to credential logic now leverage SENDER MIME header data, offering better handling of group mailboxes and forwarded messages. The result? Seamless communication across even the most intricate email systems.
• Enhanced Security Frameworks
  Keeping certificates securely tied to intended domains is critical. With our enhanced controls, private S/MIME keys are now restricted to their mapped profile domains, offering stronger protection and compliance for sensitive information.

Advancements in PGP Workflows

For many organizations, PGP encryption remains a vital component of secure communications. However, issues around key management, domain restriction, and compatibility have long been a pain point. Our updates address these with smart improvements:

• Flexible Message Options
  PGP signed-only messages are now supported, giving users the flexibility to ensure authenticity without encrypting the email. This is particularly useful in scenarios where verification is key but confidentiality is not required.
• Smarter Key Management with Key Harvesting
  With our PGP updates, encryption-valid public keys from inbound messages are automatically stored for future use. Paired with detailed audit reporting, this function minimizes manual intervention, speeding up workflows.
• Expanded Directory Searches
  Locating PGP keys has always been a cumbersome process. By integrating expanded search capabilities for third-party public LDAP directories, our updates dramatically simplify finding and using public keys.
• Enhanced Domain Security
  Security around private PGP keys has been tightened through domain restrictions, ensuring they remain tied to their intended environments and reducing the overall risk profile of your encryption infrastructure.

Cross-Cutting Enhancements

Beyond updates specific to S/MIME or PGP workflows, some key improvements apply across both encryption methods:

• Retry Mechanisms for Better Reliability
  Both workflows now benefit from built-in retry functionalities, reducing disruption during outages or temporary errors.
• Expanded LDAP Directory Functionality
  Integrated directory search expansions ensure smoother communication, especially for enterprise teams dealing with multi-domain environments.
• Sender Verification Features
  Verification processes for DKIM and SPF now help confirm sender authenticity, reducing the likelihood of fraud and phishing while enhancing overall trust in email exchanges.

Why These Updates Matter

For security professionals grappling with S/MIME and PGP, these updates deliver solutions to long-standing frustrations. The enhancements aren’t just technical tweaks; they’re tangible fixes to the daily pain points shared by many.

Take retry mechanisms, for instance. On paper, they might sound like a modest improvement. But if you’ve been in the middle of a crucial encryption process that failed because of a temporary outage, you know how disruptive those interruptions can be. With this update, certificate requests retry automatically, ensuring encryption workflows continue uninterrupted, even in less-than-perfect network conditions.

And then there’s expanded directory support. Ask anyone who has spent time hunting for the right PGP key or S/MIME certificate how much they’d value streamlined searches. By integrating broader LDAP directory capabilities and simplifying public certificate management, these updates save time and headaches. It’s a feature that acknowledges the realities of managing encryption at scale while making it just a little more manageable.

The practicality of these changes extends beyond saving time. Enhancements like domain-restricted private keys and sender verification weave security tighter into your processes. Keys that stay securely tied to their intended domains reduce access risks, while verification measures such as DKIM and SPF add an extra layer of email authenticity. These aren’t abstract benefits; they directly address risks that security teams work hard to manage every single day.

S/MIME mail flow using Echoworx Email Encryption, making existing workflows faster and smoother.

What Makes These Updates Stand Out

What’s particularly notable about these updates is the user feedback driving them. Security professionals in regions like DACH, where S/MIME and PGP are deeply ingrained in enterprise operations, consistently flagged pain points like failed exchanges and cumbersome key management. These enhancements didn’t appear in a vacuum; they were shaped by the real-world challenges shared by people entrenched in certificate-based encryption.

The details are what make the difference. Features like DigiCert integration, allowing for automatic on-demand S/MIME certificate generation, aren’t about reinventing the wheel. They’re about making existing workflows faster and smoother. Similarly, PGP’s new key-harvesting capability eliminates manual steps, helping teams move forward with fewer roadblocks.

For security pros, these changes are a reminder that great encryption tools don’t just check boxes for compliance or security. They enable better work. They reduce friction. They focus on what really matters: keeping communication secure without drawing attention to the mechanics behind it.

Curious to take a closer look at how these changes can simplify your workflows? Contact us for a walkthrough of what’s new.