Of the 20+ users of Enigmail at our shop, a quarter sporadically experience a peculiar problem when sending PGP encrypted email. At unpredictable times, outgoing encrypted email will be transmitted in a form that cannot be decrypted by the intended recipients. This happens about once or twice a month per affected user. The sender eventually hears about it, and resends: it is nearly always sent correctly encrypted the second time.
Three affected users have Enigmail 1.5.1 in Thunderbird 17.0.5 on MacOS-X 10.7, gpg (GnuPG/MacGPG2) 2.0.17. Two other users observe identical symptoms on Windows 7 (with the same versions of Thunderbird, GPG and Enigmail). Symptoms: The outgoing message, as encrypted for the intended recipients, appears to get wrapped in another layer of encryption, keyed only for the sender. The recipients get the error "secret key needed to decrypt message". The recipients will see PGP/MIME headings. This is curious since PGP/MIME was NOT selected or intended (inline is still the standard here). Affected senders are not using any per-recipient rules. If viewed by the sender in his Sent folder, the sender just sees another block of encrypted armor message. Since Enigmail 1.5, this at least can be Forwarded, and the original message will be decrypted and pasted inline. This problem (or one that from a user perspective looks exactly like it) was noted in the support forum on 2012-10-28 under the title "sent mail sporadically double encrypted?" A lot of time was spent collecting and examining debug logs from Enigmail, but no definitive cause was diagnosed. An Enigmail developer suggested this problem was likely a setup issue on our side, and perhaps someone on this forum has seen this and solved it. We've struggled to find anything common in the setups of affected parties that is not present in those of other users. No luck so far. Fresh suggestions on how to fix, work-around, or debug would be welcome. _______________________________________________ enigmail-users mailing list [email protected] https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net
