Why am I asked for a key when sending an UNencrypted email?

[Greg Steele]

I installed OpenPGP and Enigmail for Thunderbird 17. When I tested sending an encrypted email to myself, everything worked well. I was surprised when I then tried to send an UNencrypted email to my wife. I got a popup asking me to select a key for her email address or to disable encryption for her email address. I haven't used PGP, so I'm a novice here, but I was surprised that Enigmail was interested in a simple UNencrypted email. I was going to install PGP on my wife's laptop so I could email passwords to her, but if she's going to get popups every time she sends an email to someone new, I'll have to give up on PGP as a solution. Am I missing something? If an email isn't encrypted, why does Enigmail have to get in the way?

[Ludwig Hügelschäfer]

Hi Greg,

your use-case has been taken into account by Enigmail. Please go to Account settings -> OpenPGP Security and remove the check for "Encrypt messages by default". Then, go to OpenPGP->Preferences, select "Display Expert Settings" if not yet done. Go to "Key Selection" tab and select "No manual key selection".

This should do the job you want.

HTH

[Greg Steele]

Thanks a lot for the prompt response - this worked perfectly.