Thawte personal certificate

[hotnuts21]

I recently came across this and signed up, and I now have two security certificates one for firefox and one for IE, outlook etc. Which is great.

However to be honest im still a little unsure as to how they work, i can sign a certificate using them but it appears some people cant open these emails including my partners company which is govnt organisation. Also it doesnt allow me to encrypt the emails, I get an error.

So basically what I want to know is, if i send an email using the signed feature, should everyone be able to open it? Can I use this certificate to encrypt emails, if so do I need to set something up?

Can people send me signed emails using my own certificate? Does it actually offer much more security?

Thawtes site is a little lost when it comes to providing basic level information on these things.

Can anyone enlighten me?

[bwarrene]

Your better option may be to use GPG or PGP to sign and/or encrypt emails. Although recipients will need to have the same to decrypt - if you are corresponding within government infrastructure - that is not out of the question.