Go to the web site at the following address www.thawte.com. When you get to the home page of this site, scroll to the bottom of the page. Click the link at the bottom of the page that says "FREE Personal Email Certificate". Continue to follow the instructions to get your certificate. One important point to remember when you get through is that the full e-mail address that you used including the @ and the domain name will be your Thawte user ID. It will also be important to remember the password that you choose as well.

After you have your certificate, you need to install it in your e-mail client. In Outlook Express click Tools on the menu bar then click Accounts on the Tools menu. After clicking Accounts on the Tools menu, click the mail tab, highlight the default mail account, and then click the properties button. After clicking this button, click the Security tab. After clicking this tab, click the top one of the two buttons that says "Select". After clicking this button a dialog box that says "Select Certificate" will appear. Select the Thawte certificate within this box then click OK. After clicking this button, click the Apply button at the bottom then the OK button. After clicking this button click the close button in the bottom right hand corner of the Internet Accounts dialog box.

You are now ready to apply a digital signature to e-mail messages and almost ready to encrypt them as well. In order for you to be able to encrypt your messages you will need to be sending to someone who has a certificate on their machine also. You can digitally sign a message to anyone at this point. Encrypting e-mail involves something called a public key and something called a private key. Each person with a certificate has a public key and a private key. When you send an encrypted message, you send your public key along with it. The receiver uses your public key along with his private key to decrypt the message. In order to exchange encrypted messages you must first exchange digitally signed messages with your intended recipient. This first exchange allows you and your recipient to exchange public keys.

From within Outlook Express click create mail, add your recipient's address, subject, and text of message. Then click the sign and encrypt tools. Your New Message window will need to be maximized to be able to see the Sign and Encrypt tools. Notice the little ribbon and the little padlock that appear on the right side after you click these tools. Next click send. At this point a warning will appear that says that Outlook Express cannot locate the digital ID for the recipient. Click the button that says "Don't Encrypt". Next a dialog box will come up that says "Private Key Container". Click the OK button in this dialog box. Your recipient will receive a message that is signed but not encrypted. Notice that this message is signed but not encrypted. The recipient should click the button that says "Continue". After clicking this button, the message will then be readable. When the recipient received this message, he also received your public key along with it. The recipient needs to do the same thing back to you. He needs to send a message that is signed and encrypted to you just as you did to him. He will not be forced to not encrypt just like you were. He will simply receive the dialog box about the private key exchange. He will need to click OK on this dialog box. When you receive that message from him it will be both digitally signed and encrypted. When you open the message, a dialog box that says "Private Key Container" will pop up. This dialog box will pop up every time you receive a digitally signed and encrypted e-mail. Click OK in this dialog box. After you receive that e-mail from him, you both should be able to send e-mail messages back and forth to each other that are both signed and encrypted.