Re: [Evolution] Stop Evolution Automatically Asking to Decrypt Messages

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2022-10-01 at 14:21 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> Not that I can see. GPG is such a fundamental aspect of lots of
> encryption on Linux that my system won't even let me remove it and
> renaming the binary would break lots of things.
>
> One thing that comes to mind is that there is a dconf key
>
>  /org/gnome/evolution-data-server/camel-gpg-binary
>
> you could try setting that to something like /bin/false:
>
>   dconf write /org/gnome/evolution-data-server/camel-gpg-binary
> "'/bin/false'"
>
> Hopefully then it will try to run the program to decrypt the message
> and fail. 

This should do.
The password prompt does not come from evolution, but from gpg.

When confronted with a PGP block, evolution will give it to gpg (camel-
gpg-binary) to handle it. As this is an encrypted message, gpg will ask
gpg-agent to decrypt it. In this case, it has the private key but it
does not have the passphrase (if the gpg key had no passphrase or it
was already provided in this session, it would be automatically
decrypted), so it launches your pinentry to prompt for the passphrase
to unlock this key.

By setting /bin/false as your camel-gpg-binary, you effectively disable
all gpg in your evolution.

However, since you have a PGP key, and you are receiving PGP-encrypted
mails, I think you would actually benefit from evolution being able to
show your decrypted emails sometimes. So we would need to know to what
is the actual problem (you don't want to type the passphrase every time
you boot your computer? gpg-agent forgets the passphrase too early?).


Kind regards