Thunderbird and Encrypting a message using a given public key...

[Kaveh Ghaboosi]

Hi there!

I am trying to use the public key provided in this link to sign the message I'd like to send to their email address (contact@e.email). This sounds pretty simple... but I cannot get this working in anyways. How can I 1) Import this public key into Enigmail plugin of Thunderbird and 2) How to get it signed my outgoing email to the abovementioned email.

What I have tried so far was to use the wizard (advanced users) to import the key but it only accepts a public AND a secret key to be imported (perhaps those I created, not others). So there isn't other option for me to achieve what I am trying to do.

Can someone please help before I bag my head to the wall? :-))

Cheers and Thank you guys for your effort!
Kaveh

[Kaveh Ghaboosi]

My running Enigmail version 2.0.8 (20180804-1515)
My running Thunderbird version 60.0 (64-bit)

[Patrick Brunschwig]

1) the best way to import the key, is to save it as a file. Then use the key manager to import the key from the file. That 's explained in our user manual.

2) You can encrypt messages with public keys, but for signing you need your own secret key. If you do not yet have your own secret key, you first need to generate it using the Setup Wizard. Only afterwards, you can start signing and/or encrypting messages.

[Kaveh Ghaboosi]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your reply. I succesfully imported the public key (I didn't know when a popup window is open, there is a context menu available... Kind of strange UX design TBH). Now when I want to encrypt an email using that imported public key, I get this error:

The configured key ID "0x93B7803F1884DCB4787719A289AE7BAF329B274A" cannot be found on your keyring.

I only see one public key in my Key Manager and that's the one I imported. Thoughts?

Thank you
Kevin

[Patrick Brunschwig]

You need to create your own key first. There is no way to avoid that if you want to use Enigmail.