Gpg Enigmail And Error Messages
17 Jul 2015I got a GPG encrypted mail, which should be a good thing since encryption and these things. But every time I use GPG something does not work. And every time the error messages are useless.
So the moral of this blog post is: If you are a developer write meaningful error messages.
A short overview what my setup is, I have a Fedora 22 with gpg2 and my default mail client is Thunderbird. And to use Thunderbird with GPG I use the Enigmail plugin which if it's working an okayish way to read and write encrypted mails.
What was my problem? Well if you read the error messages I guess something like you haven't imported your private key yet.
gpg: decryption failed: No secret key
Error - no matching private/secret key found to decrypt message
So I checked that with gpg -K and I see my key, I even extracted the encrypted part from the mail and
decrypted it on the command line without a problem. Thanks to the Internet I was able to find other people
with the same problem.
And one of this posts gave me the right idea. By default there is no pinentry-program installed. After I installed one
with sudo dnf install pinentry-qt4 and restarted my Thunderbird it can magically encrypt the message.