Hi everybody,

first I need to address why I posted this in a privacy community: With the certificate anybody that has an e-mail client shipped with the root certificate of the CA (or one higher up in the CA chain) (so anybody) can send me an encrypted e-mail without much knowledge of the technology behind it and also be sure that it is me who receives the private message. No need to know each other/exchange and import a key/etc. beforehand as with other approaches. In this use case I am not anonymous, of course, on the contrary very much the opposite, but the message content is private. I hope I am not off-topic.

So, now it is time for my actual problem/question: This is not the first time I am researching where I could get such a certificate and last time I ended up talking to some sales guys from a CA, that first thought I was representing a company, and when they found out that I just wanted a personal certificate for one e-mail address they said they would call me back and ghosted me. At this point I should mention the obvious: In order to verify my identity to satisfy the requirements of what is often referred to as a qualified electronic signature in legal texts, such as laws and regulations like for instance EU Regulation No 910/2014, I would most probably need to show up personally at the CA or an authorized partner, which narrows down possible candidates for CAs drastically – in my case to the EU. Additionally, the CA (or one higher up the tree) should be shipped with the major mail clients, which narrowed it down to two last time…

Now, which is again a few years later, I am completely stuck in my online research, since I cannot find any company that mentions that level of identification for a private e-mail address. Instead, I am flooded with search results for services that would give me a certificate that basically does only assure that some guy proved he has access to that mail account.

Could anyone point me in the right direction, please? Thanks a lot in advance!