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Home arrow About my email certificates

About my email certificates

During 2009 (it took a lot of effort and several months) I became a "Notary" in the Thawte Web of Trust that allowed me to certify my emails with my name, and also to help authorise others to do the same.

But not long after I'd finished that, Thawte (now part of Verisign) pulled the plug on the whole programme, and instead of Thawte free email certificates said they'd give people a Verisign certificate, and after a year it would cost something like 20 USD per year. Notaries not required.

As I run a number of email accounts, and would like to sign the messages I send in these days of scams and spams, something less costly was needed.

So I decided to go with the wholly free certificate provider CACert that is more or less aligned with the open source movement. CACert is trying to get recognised by the browser/mail software makers, but it's not easy because the standard method is a very expensive audit process that CACert can't afford.

Unfortunately most people do not currently have the CACert root certificate loaded into their mail clients, and so if I signed my messages many recipients were seeing errors. That created so many difficulties that I have abandoned signing my messages by default.

If you want to be certain a message is really from me, I can send it digitally signed using my CACert certificate. But I am not doing this by default, only on request.