Re:It will affect us more than them (Score 2, Interesting)

Thawte does have a free email certificate. This allows a community verfication network to validate and certify users in a very real way. Since the identities are traceable via digital signature to the real world sender, this could allow for MTAs to allow though the Thawte certified email automatically. That could become an alternative in some scenarios, especially if popularized in conjunction with GPG/PGP style signing. Add these authorities as "root-level" authorities that are always trusted.

Again the obscurity and technical level puts these at a disadvantage without a more thorough presence in popular consciousness.