Enigmail unable to load new secret key

[Paul Holden]

I've just generated a new keypair using the gpg command line. When I launch Thunderbird and look at the Key Manager, Enigmail shows the new key as having a public key only. Similarly, when I try to sign a message with the new secret key, I get an error saying "You do not seem to have the secret key for [BLANK] on your keyring; you cannot use this key for signing.

I'm running the following:

Ubuntu v16.04
GnuPG v1.4.20 (used to generate the keypair)
GnuPG2 v2.1.11
Thunderbird v60.2.1
Enigmail v2.0.8

When I use gpg2 to list secret keys (which is what Enigmail appears to be using) it also claims there is no secret key for the specified identity. The odd thing is that there are older keypairs (also generated with gpg) that do show up in the list of secret keys available to gpg2.

Is there some kind of incompatibility between generating a keypair with gpg and using it with gpg2 that's getting in the way of using Enigmail?

[Patrick Brunschwig]

GnuPG 1.4 uses a different file to store your secret keys than GnuPG 2.1. You'll need to export your secret key from GnuPG 1.4 and import it into 2.1. I strongly recommend to not mix the usage of GnuPG 1.4 and 2.1/2.2, i.e. you should use separate directories for the two.