Re: [Evolution] GnuPG encrypting messages

[Peter Williams <peterw ximian com>]

Hi Austin,

On Mon, 2001-08-27 at 19:03, Gonyou, Austin wrote:
> I've solved my last issue sending encrypted messages with Evo. The solution
> was to ensure that "Always encrypt messages to myself" is checked. The next
> issue is that I have not been able to encrypt a message to the user in the
> "To:" section. They say they always receive it as encrypted for me, since
> they are unable to decrypt it. Yet, when I specify "gpg -a -e r
> user host com -r me myhost com" and enter a message on the command line,
> they are always able to decrypt it. So, my question is one of understaning,
> what must I do in order to use encryption and successfully have a user
> decyrypt it? For anyone who wishes to try and help me, my public key will be
> available at http://digitalroadkill.hn.org/keys/austin.hn-pub.asc and the
> address to try sending me encrypted data to is
> austin digitalroadkill hn org  Thanks in advance. 

I'm not the local PGP expert here (Jeff is), but I believe what's
probably happening is that Evolution can't find the recipient's public
key in your local keyring and so isn't encrypting the message with it.

Normally, GPG looks up the public key on a keyserver, but the problem
with that is that it can take arbitrarily long to look up the
recipient's key, during which time Evolution appears to freeze.

It's an unfortunate situation; if we don't look up keys, sending
encrypted messages can fail, but if we do, then Evolution can lock up
for a long time (on the order of 5 minutes).

I believe the current behavior is to look up keys, but we've had trouble
deciding what the default should be. Until recently, I believe the
behavior has been to *not* look up keys, so probably that's what your
copy of Evolution is doing.

Peter

-- 
Peter Williams     peter newton cx / peterw ximian com

"Why should I have to change my name? He's the one who 
sucks!"                              -- Michael Bolton