As of December 30, 2016, its then-parent company, Symantec Group, was collectively the third largest public CA on the Internet with 17.2% market share.

Shuttleworth aimed to produce a secure server not fettered by the restrictions on the export of cryptography which had been imposed by the United States.

Verisign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000—an unfortunate choice considering the imminent Y2K bug.

[4] Proceeds from the sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist[5] and to found the Ubuntu project through the creation of Canonical.

[10] This led to the sale of Symantec's certificate business which included Thawte in August 2017 to Thoma Bravo LLC for $1 billion[11] with the intention of merging it with DigiCert.

Associating the Thawte FreeMail account with the real identity of the person owning was based on a Web of trust model.

The person's identity was assured by meeting face-to-face with one or more "Thawte Notaries" who needed to see identification and keep a copy of it (for at least five years).

With fewer than 50 points, the certificates issued had "Thawte Freemail Member" in the name field.

CAcert, the free certification authority, took over a large part of the participants of the Thawte Web of Trust through a special programme.