SSL Certificate Trust in OS X Mail

If you're like me, and you want to use SSL IMAP in Leopard Mail, but your mail server is named something different than the certificate name, you've undoubtedly been hit with the "Mail can't verify the identity of" box when starting mail, even if you've told OS X to trust that certificate.

I believe I finally found the solution. Find the certificate in question under Keychain Access. Double click it to open it, and select the trust section. Change the top menu item to "Use Custom Settings" and change the values for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and X.509 Basic Policy to "Always Trust." Leave the others with "No value specified." Close the certificate, close keychain access and restart OS X mail. Bam, you're good to go.

It seems like there's a feature where if you tell Keychain to "Always Trust" the certificate for everything, you'll still get that annoying popup when you start mail.

You may have to fudge around with it a bit, and delete the certificate and start over, but this seems to be the right direction for this annoying problem.