It’s been almost two months now that I am using Bluehost‘s hosting and I am really satisfied by the services they offer. One of these is the SSL service for the mail accounts they give along with the hosting services. For those of you who don’t know what SSL is, you can read about it here.

After I created a mail account using my domain name, the first thing I did was to configure it using Outlook 2007. I properly configured my mail account to use SSL using the following settings.

• Account Type: IMAP
• Incoming Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com (*** is the server number given by bluehost)
• Outgoing Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com
• Check for the outgoing (SMTP) server to require authentication using the same settings as incoming server.
• Incoming Server Port (IMAP): 993 (SSL)
• Outgoing Server Port (SMTP): 465 (SSL)

And that’s that. All was well except for one issue. Whenever I started Outlook, it gave me the following error message.

“The server you are connected to is using a security certificate 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?

On choosing ‘Yes’ as an answer everything worked just fine, but this error message always welcomed me whenever I started Outlook. Basically the problem was that the SSL certificate is in the name of Bluehost, while the mail account for being configured in my username, expected else.

So I asked my best friend, Google, for help and sure he did help, although a lot of search and study had to be done by me to find a solution, which is as follows:

1. Open Internet Explorer as an administrator.
2. Go to the URL https://box***.bluehost.com:993, here *** refers to the server number. Check yours in your email settings panel or Cpanel.
3. IE will give a warning as displayed below. Click on ‘continue to this website’.



4. The address bar of Internet Explorer goes all red, and a keylock/error message appears in the extreme right of it, click on it and click on ‘view certificate’ and then click ‘install certificate’.



5. When the certificate import wizard starts, choose the option ‘Place all certificates in the following store’.
6. Click browse and choose to install certificate in the ‘Trusted Root Certification Authorities’.
7. OK -> Next and we are done.
8. Repeat the same process for the other port, https://box***.bluehost.com:465
9. Voila! We are done.

Next time Outlook fired all engines and SSL enabled mail started kicking in and out.