Last week I posted – in frustration – about Thawte’s decision to exit the Personal E-Mail Certificate business. They did so for pretty obvious reasons – why give away free certificates – as they had done for years – while bearing the costs of supporting them, etc.
As part of the transition, Thawte offered a 1 year free VeriSign Class 1 Individual certificate – and I had grumbled that the VeriSign issuance process didn’t seem to work well on my Mac. I was wrong.
Looking at my Keychain, the new VeriSign certificates were issued correctly and installed in my Mac’s Keychain. To use them, I needed to “untrust” my Thawte certificates and, once I did so, they started working fine for signing and encrypting in my Mac’s Mail.app.
Bottom line: I’m sorry to see Thawte exit this business but I understand why they did so. I appreciate VeriSign’s generosity in making a 1 year cert available. But I still think all of this secure email stuff is way to hard.
If only my friends at Voltage would step up to fully supporting the Mac, I’d be a very happy camper, I’m sure!