Thawte SSL Certificate Reviews

All notification mails from thawte are sent with
From: yourname@yourdomain.com
To: yourname@yourdomain.com

This is one of the most common patterns spam-blockers react on.
After several times of telling thawte i've given up, they do not accept the improvement to change the sender to something like noreply@thawte.com or so...

Thawte SSL certificates work fine. There are no problems getting them issued or with popular browsers accepting them.

However, the Thawte support staff are terrible. Thawte is in the process of implementing a change to the seal/badge that they allow their Certificate Customers to show on their sites. I have received a number of duplicate emails from Thawte about this change even though I made the required changes on my site after receiving the first email. I have tried emailing and calling to have them stop sending the duplicate emails, but they say they can't do anything about it since the emails are automated. They won't even transfer me to the voice mail of someone in the department responsible for sending the emails. After arguing with the support rep about being transferred, I informed him that he had 3 choices: 1) Transfer me to the appropriate voice mail, 2) Transfer me to his supervisor or 3) I would be taking my business elsewhere. After this I was put on "indefinite" hold while the support rep tried to find someones voice mail to transfer me to. I guess I'll be taking by SSL Certificae business to company that isn't owned by Verisign.

I have had extremely slow response time with Thawte. Their South African processing center is not 24 hours, and on their native time (I'm in the united states) they are closed during many times that I need an answer. After all of the paperwork is processed and the certificate is paid for, they can take a day to process, when there's really no more approval to be done. They're inexpensive, which is a definite big bonus, but start your renewal process a week in advance to fix all the hangups in the process that you have to bug their technical support about. Be prepared to use their technical support chat over and over for every single certificate.

This site offers FREE email security certificates. The downside to this is that you have to answer a lot of questions in order to get the certificate, because there has to be a process of identity verification in lieu of a credit card number, etc... On the upside, though, once you go through the verification process, you can get as many email security certs as you want for FREE and without having to reverify your identity. The certificates you will receive from thawte use an encryption/decryption process involving smime.p7s which is a standard of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for sending signed and encrypted email, as well as ANY type of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). Most S/MIME implementations are based around the X.509 standard for public keys since PGP uses a separate standard called OpenPGP for putting its data into email messages. The pkcs #7 in "smime.p7s" represents the data format for keys in X.509. X.509 is nice, because it can be used for ssh public keys, as well as for signatures. (As always, though, you should use a separate or subkey for encryption, since it is logically separate from authentication.) However, most users do not need a permanent SSH/SSL key. If money is not an issue, you may want to go a different route for an email security cert. Although other companies charge for their email certs, the identity verification process is less grueling than thawte's. But what the heck? IT'S FREE!