How to sign an email correctly?

Question

Email

Can e-mails signed with a free Comodo certificate be legally valid in Russia, or does the court accept as evidence only e-mail correspondence signed by certificates issued by companies from this list of accredited certification centers ?
And I apologize for the second question, but I have never dealt with digital signatures before, how is it customary to take a separate certificate for each employee or one for several? Or depending on the tasks, someone separate, someone common?

Answer 1

Everything is well described in 63-FZ:
- electronic documents signed by a qualified electronic signature have legal force a priori, unless the opposite is stated about this type of document in any federal law (for example, many personnel documents cannot be kept in electronic form, etc. .p.)
- electronic documents signed by an unqualified electronic signature (including Comodo), on the contrary, acquire legal force only if there is a previously signed (live) agreement between you (the sender) and the addressee (recipient) (or another act) describing all the details of verification and recognition / non-recognition of such an electronic signature.
Accordingly, for example, the second option with government agencies will not work, because there is no such agreement between you and government agencies, and according to federal laws, cases of using unqualified electronic signatures are rare.

Answer 2

I will answer you a little differently.
The court will accept as it pleases. At the moment, almost any Court will say that "there is no technical possibility" and this will close the issue.

Answer 3

The practice of recognizing the validity of EDS in Russia is rather poor. In general, I agree with Andrey ( Andrey ), but there are still cases of the use of unqualified EDS by state bodies. I will illustrate with examples from my field of activity.
1. An electronic application for an invention, utility model or trademark in Russia can only be filed through the electronic filing portal of Rospatent using a (strengthened) qualified digital signature issued by an accredited certification center. But further correspondence with Rospatent on applications can be carried out simply through a personal account on the Rospatent website with normal authorization (login and password, which in this case are equated to an unqualified EDS) even without using a secure connection. The function of the contract according to the law 63-FZ is performed by a personally signed application (on paper) for conducting electronic correspondence through a personal account.
2. Through the taxpayer's personal account ( https://lk2.service.nalog.ru/lk/)it is possible to submit official applications equivalent to paper ones, while authorization in the LC is possible both with a qualified EDS (the one for the public services portal) and with a login with a password, which must be obtained by personally appearing at the tax office with an application and a passport.
3. An agreement with a counterparty may provide that the parties to the agreement recognize electronic messages and documents sent by e-mail to certain addresses specified in the agreement (or by fax, by uploading to an external ftp or intranet, etc.) as equivalent to paper ones. . In this case, it is possible to provide for subsequent confirmation in the form of a paper original with a signature / seal, or you may not do this. By the way, Rospatent uses this method to receive documents by fax - the date of receipt of the fax is taken as the date of receipt of the document if the fax is received in full and in a readable form, and the original document was received by Rospatent within a month. The function of the contract is performed by the relevant Regulations.