Help importing non-self-signed keys

[Michael Weiss]

Hello all,

I am developing an automated secure data transfer system using email and 
gnupg (gpgme)

I get an error no-user-id somtimes when I import a key, and somtimes I dont.
I cannot tell what causes it to fail somtimes and not others.

I read previous posts in this list and found that the error 'no user id' is 
because the key is not self signed.  The post mentioned an option that
could be passed to gpg to override the default behaviour of not accepting
non self signed keys, but this does not help me as I am using gpgme and
can't pass options to gpg (that I know of!).

What really gets me is that it works fine sometime and not others.

Should it not fail consistantly or pass consistantly?

I am using:
Mandrake 8.2
gnupg 1.2.2
gpgme 0.3.15

I am trying to figure out how to sign the key when I am exporting it as this 
seems to be to correct way of fixing the problem...

This is my new high level algorithm so far (It doesnt work) 

On the mobile end:
----------------------
I export the public key to a file with ASCII armor on.
Then I sign the file with my private key
Then I encrypt and email the key to the recipient

On the server end:
--------------------- 
I decrpyt the file with my public key
Then I run verify to convert the signed file to plaintext
Then I import the plaintext

Could anyone tell me if I am going about this the right way?

Am I doing things in the wrong order?  Is there a better way?

Thanks,

Michael Weiss