Cannot find secret key error

[Anthony E. Greene]

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On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
>I'm trying to debug a strange problem, and I'm now stuck.
>
>A friend of mine unsuccessfully attempted to send me an encrypted message.
>We both use gpg fairly regularly -- me hourly, him weekly, though this is the
>first encrypted message he has sent me.  He is using evolution 0.13 which
>sent the encrypted data as an attachment, I am slightly suspicious that
>evolution corrupted the data somehow, perhaps by changing the header. I use
>KMail which doesn't notice the attachment is GPG data but does let me save
>the attachment to a file.

The output of gpg -d -v -v is the key:

gpg: encrypted with 1024-bit ELG-E key, ID 9A843F52, created 2001-08-06
      "ben handley <ben.handley@softhome.net>"
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available


This clearly shows that Ben encrypted the message to himself, and not to
you. Since you don't have the matching private key (Ben's private key) gpg
tells you it can't find the required key.

Tell Ben to make sure he selects your key as the recipient next time:

  gpg -e -a -r lakeland@acm.org message.txt

Tony
- -- 
Anthony E. Greene <agreene@pobox.com> <http://www.pobox.com/~agreene/>
PGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26  C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D
Chat:  AOL/Yahoo: TonyG05
Linux. The choice of a GNU Generation. <http://www.linux.org/>



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