hello and thank you all for spending your time on this. i changed to gpg 1.3.2 and then it started to work, which feels strange, since i too was thinking of kmail having a problem rather then gpg. anyway, now it works and i cannot reproduce it. case closed for now. stig __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com