gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

[Charly Avital]

Joe Demeny wrote the following on 5/16/08 11:35 AM:
> I'm trying to decrypt a message using KMail and gpg and it fails. I then tried 
> to manually decrypt the encrypted part and this is what I got:
> 
> $ gpg -v -d test
> gpg: using character set `US-ASCII'
> Warning: using insecure memory!
> gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
> Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (FreeBSD)
> :pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 16, keyid 72F9D3DCCF8503BE
>         data: [2046 bits]
>         data: [2048 bits]
> gpg: armor header:
> gpg: public key is CF8503BE
> :encrypted data packet:
>         length: unknown
> gpg: encrypted with ELG key, ID CF8503BE
> gpg: decryption failed: No secret key
> 
> I'm wondering what the error "No secret key" means? Am I trying to decrypt the 
> message with the wrong key? Or have I broken my gpg setup?


Key ID CF8503BE that was used to encrypt that message is the encryption
subkey of:

pub  1024D/22321032  created: 1999-11-10  expires: never       usage: SCA
                     trust: []       validity: []
sub  2048g/CF8503BE  created: 1999-11-10  expires: never       usage: E
[ unknown] (1). Janos Dohanics <web at 3dresearch.com>

That key belongs, therefore, to Janos Dohanics <web at 3dresearch.com>, who
is the only person who can decrypt that message, *if* he has in keyring
the above key, and *if* he knows the required passphrase.

Hope this helps?
Charly