13
OCT
‘09

Thawte Ending "Web of Trust" On November 16

We picked up this story on Slashdot and received a confirmation mail from Thawte a few days later:

Important Thawte® Personal E-mail Certificate Holder Notice Thawte Personal
E-mail Certificates and Web of Trust are being discontinued.

Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.


We use the certificate on nearly all our mail accounts, as do many of our clients and partners. The certificate works well with Mail.app, with almost zero configuration and has been very handy sending encrypted messages to others on the Web Of Trust community. For this reason alone, I am disappointed. However, Thawte (VeriSign) are offering up to $100.00 off the purchase of an SSL and/or code signing certificate(s). VeriSign are also offering a free one year replacement personal E-mail certificate, which would normally cost $19.95.

Alternative 'Free' personal E-mail certificates can be found at CAcert and Comodo
Posted in Category News by Nathan Querido