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using key

2017-02-15
2017-02-15
  • Peter Jennings

    Peter Jennings - 2017-02-15

    I've just installed Enigmail on the latest version ot Thunderbird running on Windows 10.
    During setup I used LastPass to generate and remember my 16 character random key. All seemed to go well except I could not paste the key back into the screen when trying to create the revocation certificate, so I skipped this step.
    I've just sent myself a test message and again, on receipt I can't paste the key into the pinentry.exe Passphrase box. It is difficult to re-establish focus on this box once lost, but manually entering the key gives an error message. Any idea where I'm going wrong and why I can't paste the key?

     
    • Rob

      Rob - 2017-02-15

      I've just sent myself a test message and again, on receipt I can't paste
      the key into the pinentry.exe Passphrase box. It is difficult to
      re-establish focus on this box once lost, but manually entering the key
      gives an error message. Any idea where I'm going wrong and why I can't
      paste the key?

      pinentry is part of GnuPG, not Enigmail. Werner Koch, the main author
      of GnuPG, considers cut-and-paste in pinentry to be a serious security
      problem and has declared pinentry will not support it.

      See, e.g.:

      https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2011-August/042639.html

       
  • Peter Jennings

    Peter Jennings - 2017-02-15

    Thanks for your quick reply. Oh wonderful! So every time I receive a message I've got to type in the 16 random characters with no easy way of doing it. BTW, I've found the other problem, I was mistaking a lower case 'L' for the digit '1', something that cut and paste would have got right first time. But I suppose this is the wrong forum for discussing GnuPG.

     
    • Rob

      Rob - 2017-02-15

      Thanks for your quick reply. Oh wonderful! So every time I receive a
      message I've got to type in the 16 random characters with no easy way of
      doing it.

      No, you can set GnuPG to cache your passphrase for a set period of time.
      Look into gpg-agent.conf.

       
  • Peter Jennings

    Peter Jennings - 2017-02-15

    Hi Rob, sorry to be such a nuisance
    I couldn't find a gpg-agent.conf file anywhere on the C: drive, but the Enigmail Troubleshooting page says, under "How to fix continuous requests for passphrase"

    Add the following line to C:\Users\<your login>\AppData\Roaming\gnupg:
    use-standard-socket
    Then reboot your computer.

    https://www.enigmail.net/index.php/en/faq?view=topic&id=14

    I presumed that I should create a gpg-agent.conf file in this folder and add the line to it. But to no avail, still continuous requests.

     
    • Ludwig Hügelschäfer

      Peter, you can enter the passphrase caching time easily by using the Enigmail GUI. Just go there: Enigmail menu -> Preferences. Then take the basic tab and enter your caching time. Enigmail will tell GnuPG and GnuPG will create gpg-agent.conf.

       
  • Peter Jennings

    Peter Jennings - 2017-02-15

    Thank you both for your help.

     

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