A friend tried to get a Thawte S/MIME cert tonight, and was having trouble.  I decided to get a new cert to walk him through the process.  It turned out to be a change in the Thawte enrollment process, that I hope is a web site bug.

After the Thawte CA issues the cert, it takes you to a page with the "Fetch" button at the bottom.  When you click on that button, Firefox is supposed to import the certificate so you can use it.  Instead, tonight my friend and I got this confusing Save File dialog.



Eh?  SPC files are code signing certs, right?

I tried to alert Thawte, but that also proved to be a challenge.  Their vintage email submission code does not allow exotic symbols like equals, quotes, and parentheses.  Sadly, that means I cannot include actual URLs to their site since many of the good ones include an equals sign.

I really like the Thawte free S/MIME cert program and I hope they get this fixed before you read this entry. ;-)