Enigmail issue with Ubuntu 16.04, Thunderbird 38.8.0

Question

Enigmail! It's great for remaining secure.

When it works, anyways. I seem to have a bit of an issue with Enigmail in which I can click on an encrypted email, but the email simply shows a blank page and no error message is thrown. I can't tell what is broken, and no FAQs are really being helpful, either. I've tried a reinstall of gpg and gpg2, but that doesn't help either.

Ubuntu v16.04, Thunderbird v38.8.0, Enigmail v1.9.3

Answer 1

How I solved this:

Essentially, the only sane way I could find of fixing this was to completely reinstall the OS. I was able to do an export of my previous enigmail settings (including the key) and subsequently import it to a different client. I moved from Ubuntu 16.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, so there should be little difference behind-the-scenes, there.

Either way, that's it. If you're having a similar issue and don't want a reinstall, try making a new question. Sorry for not providing a cleaner solution.

Answer 2

An old question, but Enigmail still fails silently on occasion. Three possibilities:

1. A non-obvious problem with gpg. Try running gpg -k on the command line. If it hangs, you may have a poisoned key in your pubring.gpg. See here for an explanation and a one-liner to detect the poisoned key (requires gpg 2 or later). You may also find it quicker simpler to replace pubring.gpg from a backup. Sometimes there may be one in the same directory.
2. Some problem with gpg-agent and the pinentry method. See Resolving issues with GnuPG 2.x and gpg-agent on the Enigmail site.
3. Corrupt Enigmail storage. Close Thunderbird, and find which profile directory you are using. Within that there should be a file enigmail.sqlite. Move that to a backup location. Restart Thunderbird and try again.

For example, I had a situation when the Key Management dialogue did not appear, or on the second attempt it appeared and rapidly closed. The answer turned out to be case 1 above, with a 22M key from Torproject.org.