From one day to another my Enigmail Thunderbird Plug-In stopped working and I can no longer decrypt messages send to me encrypted with my public key. Even if I wrote these messages myself.
Every time I try to decrypt a message the following error shows up:
Fehler - Entschlüsselung fehlgeschlagen
Öffentlicher Schlüssel MYKEYCODE zur Überprüfung der Unterschrift benötigt
gpg: Entschlüsselung fehlgeschlagen: Geheimer Schlüssel ist nicht vorhanden
Hinweis: Die Nachricht wurde mit folgenden Benutzer-IDs / Schlüsseln verschlüsselt:
0xMYKEYCODE (Robert Lastname <[email protected]>)
I use a German Thunderbird, so here is my translation:
Error - Decryption failed
Public Key MYKEYCODE needed to verify signature
gpg: Decryption failed: Secret (private) key not found
Hint: Message was encrypted with the following User-Ids/Keys:
0xMYKEYCODE (Robert Lastname <[email protected]>)
How can the private key be missing? I personally encrypted the message before sending it to myself. I have been trying now for hours to solve this. I have reinstalled Enigmail a couple of times. I also reinstalled GnuPG a couple of times. I deleted all my keys and reimported them. What drives me especially crazy is, that I have another Laptop using Enigmail with the very same public-private key pair and there everything works just fine.
What makes me suspicious is that 0xMYKEYCODE from the error message is different from the code of my public-private key pair in my key manager, how can this be?
Thanks a lot in advance and cheers, Robert
EDIT: Maybe this helps: I can not sign messages on the computer that cannot decrypt, but I can sign on my other machine. So, apparently Enigmail cannot use my private key, why?
EDIT2: If I try to sign a message, it refuses with the failure "Error - wrong passphrase". That got me thinking, after re-importing all my keys, I was never ever asked to provide the passphrase that secures my public-private key pair anywhere!?
EDIT3: If I evoke
echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent
on the laptot where encryption works, it tells me that gpg-connect-agent
is not installed??? Could it be that on the laptop where it works the keys are actually managed by the gnome key ring (despite Enigmail telling me that they are managed by gpg-agent)?
However, on the laptop where the decryption no longer works, I can evoke echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent
. Thus gpg is taking care and maybe makes a mess in combination with the gnome key ring?
.eml
file and try do decrypt it with the GnuPG command line tool for further diagnosis:gpg -d /path/to/message.eml
. What's the (redacted) output and/or error message of that command? You can force English messages if you prependLC_MESSAGES=C
to a command.gpg -d
) works just fine. I am prompted to enter my passphrase and the message is decrypted. Thus, somehow Enigmail messes up asking me for my pgp passphrase, but why?