Certificates not trusted

[Michelle]

I am a soldier, and my husband works for the state of WV. Neither one of us
can access our email from home. We both get the same error

The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a
trusted certificate authority.

This is aggravating. How much more of a trusted certificate authority do you
need than state and federal government sites?

How can this be fixed? We are running Windows Vista Home Premium, McAffee
Security and IE7. None of the fixes that I have been able to find in other
discussions have worked. I have tried clearing SSL, disabling or enabling
add-ons, "run as administrator" nothing has worked. And the computer came
with this setup, so there is nothing for me to back track to and get rid of
IE7. I never had this problem with any other version of IE. And don't tell me
that this is adhering to the standards. The government creates the standards,
and I can't get to that either.

 

[Jesper]

It can get a lot more trusted than that.

Your cert is probably issued off the Federal Bridge Certificate Authority,
and I would guess that the state one is issued off some internal CA for the
State of WV. Neither of those is in the trusted root store in Windows, and
that is what is causing the error that you see.

Since I doubt you can influence the DoD to get their certs installed in the
root store, you can do it yourself using this method:
1. Launch Internet Explorer as an administrator. To do that, right-click the
Internet Explorer icon and select "Run as administrator..."
2. Navigate to the site that is showing the error.
3. When you see the "There is a problem with this website's security
certificate" message, click the text that says "Continue to this website (not
recommended).
4. At the top of the window you will see a red address bar. At the right end
of that is a little red shield with an X through it and the text "Certificate
Error". Click the text that says "Certificate Error" and click "View
Certificates"
5. Click the "Certification Path" tab
6. Select the top-most certificate you see there and click "View
Certificate" If there is only one certificate there (unlikely) then click the
General tab again.
7. In the General tab click the "Install Certificate..." button.
8. Click "Next >" twice and then Finish. Click OK.
9. Close Internet Explorer and reopen it normally. When you now navigate to
the site you will no longer get this warning.