Another day, and still no luck..

I gave this some thought. Please tell me if I am on the right track.
The created user cert, signed by a ca like cacert inherits trust because the ca cert is in the ca cert store in my browser. Also my pub and private key are installed in the browser as well a other users pub key which have been signed by the same ca cert sign key. I have no errors or mismatch when going to
https://sitename and all works as it should.
When I imported my pub and private key in webmail it seemed to work and showed up in the right place. I used pkcs#12 w/ cert chain.I also tried witout chain and got same results.
I searched forum and found imapd.pem info but it was our cert. I thought it might authenticate off of it but even if did the same ca cert should pass the trust on to any other cert that was signed by that ca. That is why I asked where does web mail look to verify the signature validity of the sender. Shouldn't it be in the browsers cert store? Does web mail require a cert to be placed in a certain folder to verify the sender?
I really like these features and need some help to make it work.
SME is a very fine product and I hope to get it all working soon.
Thanks in advance for any help!
HMB