The goal of this page is to walk you through the steps of Thwate Personal Certificate, which will allow you to create an identity, have it asserted to be valid, integrate it into your mail client, and configure your mail client to send and receive encrypted and signed messages.

The result will be that you can verify the authenticity of e-mail messages (that they're really coming from who it says they are) and that the contents can be encrypted so that only the recepient and sender can read it.

Get started:

1. Create a Thawte ID

2. Get your identity asserted before you generate a certificate.

   Any certificate that you generate before your identity is asserted will have "Freemail User" as your name since Thawte can't vouch for who you are. So don't bother generating a certificate until your identity is asserted since otherwise, you'll just have to do it again.

3. Get identity asserted

   Using Thawte's Web of Trust, you'll need to meet up with some folks, show them your identification, sign some paperwork, and then your identity will be asserted once you've received 50 points from thawte notaries.

4. Generate your own private key and get a certificate

   1. Instructions for Mac OS X / OpenSSL Mail.app

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