Blackberry and S/MIME

We're in the early stages of rolling out digital certificates for signing and encrypting email (S/MIME). In what seemed like a stroke of good timing, Blackberry is no longer charging a separate Client Access License to use S/MIME. Prior to June 2nd, it would have cost us $10,000 to purchase 100 S/MIME CALs.

One might think that because they were charging such an exorbitant rate that S/MIME support would actually work. Sadly this is not the case. We're running what I believe is the latest S/MIME for Blackberry client, and users regularly get a message that "an unexpected error occurred" when they attempt to open some signed or encrypted messages. Thanks that's very a helpful error message.

Blackberry Enterprise Server v4.1 SP 5 (which we are already running) provides support for encrypted attachment viewing in version 4.5. Unfortunately Blackberry 4.5 is sort of like the Locke Ness Monster. Some people claim to have seen it, but no one knows when it will officially be discovered.

At this point, I'm not sure the problem is even consistently reproducible, but it seems to be enough that my Director wants to stall my project until Blackberry 4.5 is out. That's just great. This project began over three years ago and hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent. Lets not deploy because 5% of the company might not be able to open 1% of their messages.