Keychain error 26276 on importing Comodo e-mail certificate

Hi Guys,

This is on Mojave.

The play is like this:

I'm using mail certificates from Comodo.com.

These mail certificates are free, so yeah. I've been using them for years without a hitch.

They expire every year, so a couple of days into running mojave, it was time to get a new certificate.

After the enrolment you get an e-mail that provides a link with which you collect a file called CollectCCC.crt.p7s

You can open this file with Keychain, and see the certificates that it contains.

Now the only thing left is to import them into the keychain.

You can do this by double-clicking the file, or selecting File-Import from within the keychain app.

Whichever way, this leads to an error 26276.

I'm now stuck without the ability to sign/encrypt my e-mail, and that's bad.

Any work-arounds that you know of?

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012)

Posted on Sep 27, 2018 6:35 AM

Top-ranking reply

Hoot Posthorn Author

Level 1

16 points

Posted on Sep 27, 2018 7:48 AM

Follow up:

There are pretty much no helpful articles about this in the support forums. Yes, some refer you to an Apple support article that explain stuff about the Keychain assistant (which for this work is pretty useless)

But, wait, there is more

It seems like the error in effect is a duplicate warning of sorts.

I tested this as follows:

I have multiple e-mail accounts at various providers.

For two of those I enrolled and obtained a new certificate.

They both landed as *.crt.p7s file in my download folder.

Double click on both consecutively results in said error for each of them.

But.. it's not all bad.

I now go to my secondary e-mail, and send a SIGNED mail to my primary mail account.

Now I switch to my primary, and start an e-mail to my secondary, for which I now have a public key. With that I can encrypt my e-mail to my secondary mail address.

I see the padlock and seal icons in my mail create screen again as they should

So, it seems all to work, and all this is a false alarm. Sort of.

Here's my gripe:

Now, more than ever, it is very important to use secured communications in all that you do, whenever you do it.

This means that setting up mail certificates should be as simple as using https in your browser.

Installing a mail certificate should.not.raise.any.questions. whatsoever. If you need to be a rocket scientist to install a certificate, THEN THE DEVELOPERS HAVE FAILED to deliver. It is that simple.

That's why.

Oh, and don't give me that 'gotta fill out the feedback form' jive please. Once above a certain number of points you are in contact with apple's community management. If you think security is important, run it up through your channels as wel, pretty please with sprinkles on top..

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Keychain error 26276 on importing Comodo e-mail certificate

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