I’ve noticed some confusing behaviours:
First, there is a spurious 2048 bit RSA key being created, which lacks any passphrase, when using Thunderbird 52.7.0 with Enigmail 2.0.2. There is already a key for the email account in question, although the email address is not set to be the primary uid, and the key has a passphrase, although gpg-agent works fine for other MUAs. There are numerous problems with creating a new key when a valid key already exists: It breaks for users who decrypt their mail on multiple devices. It’s insecure for users who manage their key’s more rigorously, like by keeping their root SC private key offline, using short expirations, using a smart card, etc. Second, there is no way to suppress this behaviour from within Thunderbird. If you go to [account] -> View settings for this account -> OpenGPG Security and then click the Enable OpenPGP security Enigmail toggle box then may select to use a specific key, but this setting appears to be ignored and sometimes gets erased later. As an aside, anytime you click this box it asks if you want to disable pEp, but clicking cancel still checks the box, so you must uncheck it and click cancel again. At present the only easy solution I’ve found is: gpg -K | grep rsa2048 # yields the spurious_key_id assuming you never use 2048 bit keys yourself gpg --delete-secret-keys spurious_key_id sudo chown root .gnupg/private-keys-v1.d sudo chmod 550 .gnupg/private-keys-v1.d I’ve only done cursory testing of this workaround, but no obvious harmful side effects arose. You must obviously reverse these changes to do private key management, preferably without Thunderbird running. Also contacts might send a messages encrypted to the wrong key, so they may need to run: gpg --delete-keys spurious_key_id You could easily wind up with numerous spurious_key_id by messing around with this. Assuming you’ve never used a 2048 bit key then your contacts could generate commands to delete them all by running: gpg -k | grep your_email_address -B 2 | grep rsa2048 | cut -c15-33 | sed -e 's/^/gpg --delete-keys /' A cleaner workaround would be replacing the gpg binary used by Enigmail/pEp with a wrapper script that blocks attempts to create new keys, perhaps by blocking the --quick-generate-key option, or else permits Enigmail/pEp to generate its own key but adds the —homedir to prevent breaking the user’s .gnupg database. I’m hoping that someone here can tell me how to force Enigmail/pEp in Thunderbird to use the correct GPG key, preferably without deactivating pEp. Best, Jeff p.s. Just fyi, the system is MacOS 10.13.4 with gpg installed both from MacPorts (gpg 2.2.6 libgcrypt 1.8.2) and MacGPG2 (gpg 2.2.3 libgcrypt 1.8.1), which causes a warning when accessing gpg-agent "gpg: WARNING: server 'gpg-agent' is older than us (2.2.3 < 2.2.6)”, but retargeting /usr/local/bin/gpg symlink to fix this warning seemingly had no effect. I’ve not tested for this behaviour in Enigmail/pEp on Linux due to using other MUAs.
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