Moving PC's and Passphrase not being remembered from Enigmail

[JohnS]

Im experiencing a bit of a weird issue

I recently moved PC's, same distro from Xubuntu to Xubuntu.
I restored my Thunderbird profile exactly to what it was, with all
settings as is.
I re-imported my public and private keys into the new installation via
gnupg.

I then saw in Enigmail that 2 of the keys were in bold text.

Whenever i received an email in the previous installation, to decrypt it
i wouldnt need to enter the password, it was remembered somehow (i dont
remember if i had saved it in password manager though), but i remember
that i definitely did not increase the timeout in Enigmail passphrase
preferences.

Now in the new Xubuntu installation, for some reason it is asking for
the passphrase to decrypt the mail. Can you tell me why?

Lets say hypothetically that the passphrase was stored in password
manager and i restored TB, shouldnt it use that passphrase it had saved?
I dont understand why i needed to re-enter it, if i restored TB profile
as is.

Hope someone can shed some light.

[Patrick Brunschwig]

If the password was stored in a password manager, then it's not the Thunderbird password manager.

The password is handled by GnuPG without involvement by Enigmail or Thunderbird. Therefore the password would be stored by something like gnome-keyring, seahorse-agent or similar, and is not in the Thunderbird profile.

[JohnS]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense now.
Do you know where exactly gnupg stores the password permanently in Xubuntu? Or where i can find out more about this?

Can you also tell me why a few of those keys i imported are in bold in Enigmail Key Management?

[Patrick Brunschwig]

Do you know where exactly gnupg stores the password permanently in Xubuntu? Or where i can find out more about this?

It's not GnuPG that stores your key, but some of the tools like gnome-keyring, seahorse-agent or something similar (that's part of your distribution). I can't know how you set up your computer and which tool yoou're using, and I don't know where each of these tools would store the password.

Can you also tell me why a few of those keys i imported are in bold in Enigmail Key Management?

Bold keys are your own keys (i.e. those for which you have the secret key). Not bold keys are public keys from other people.