How Does a Client Certificate Work?
Installed in the email clients such as Outlook, Client-Side certificate is used for digitally signing and encrypting email communications & all the attachments sent through emails. Furthermore, another significant benefit you get by signing your emails using a client certificate is that it verifies your identity as a sender of an email to the person you're sending an email to. Lastly, it also secures the integrity of an email message before it transmits further over the internet.
Once the email server is configured, it'll provide access to only those users who have the correct client certificate. Furthermore, if the user doesn't have a client certificate, and whenever the user tries to access the server, it'll result in failure.
It uses public and private key pairs like other X.509 certificates. Here, a private key is assigned to a user, and it's also used for digitally signing your outgoing email communications with the user's unique identity. Similarly, the associated public key is used for verifying the signature and encrypted message.