encrypting email mistake

[Charly Avital]

At 12:51 AM +0200 5/11/02, Ali Chahvand wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>i am pretty new to gpg or to other kind of encryption so i am had a lot of
>stuff to do the last few days ...
>I am using gpg (GnuPG) 1.0.7 with sylpheed 0.75 and have compiled sylpheed
>with the correct "configure flag" so it works fine and shows me unter
>preferences a privacy icon where i can make ajustment to stuff related to
>encyption.
>
>The problem is, that if i activate the encrytion option, he asks me to
>select a public key for the user i want to email to. But there are none,
>which i can select ! There is no, even not one single publci key i can see
>altough i have almost 10 imported. I have generated an own key and
>everything, i imported the pub key from the one i want to send the mail to
>and when i type gpg --list-keys he does show me the data fom the person
>whoo i want to write a encrypted mail.
>
>What could have gone wrong ? Or where may i have made mistakes ?

The reason might be that gpg will not let you use for encryption a public
key for which gpg cannot found a trust path in your keyring.

There are options that can work around this limitation, but I wouldn't
advise to use them.

A simple, but maybe not elegant solution, is to sign *locally* those public
keys you want to encrypt to, using the private key of the keypair you
generated after installing gpg.

Signing locally means that the signature will not be exportable. But if you
know the owners of those public keys, and you are convinced that they are
the true owners (because of previous contacts, or any other mean that
satisfies you), you can sign the key *normally*, if you want.

Once signed (locally or else), those keys should be available for
encryption, and when gpg asks you to select the public key for the user you
want to email to, you can choose the appropriate public key.


I hope this helps.


Charly