Freeminded.org

I’m using Thunderbird and Enigmail on Kubuntu, signing all my email and encrypting correspondence whenever possible. Lately (probably due to an update) the password-entry window does not appear. In stead, it complains immediately about:

openpgpg alert - error bad passphrase

I have set the preferences to remember my password for several minutes, so I figured there’s some problem there. I am not using gpg-agent, so EnigMail should fall back to the default.

Checking OpenPGP > Debugging Options > View Console shows what Enigmail is doing. I type my message (signing option checked) and click Send. The console shows:

gpg: gpg-agent is not available in this session
gpg: can't query passphrase in batch mode

Which makes sense, I am not using gpg-agent. Finally, it complains:

gpg; [stdin]: clearsign failed: bad passphrase

And gives up. Googling around I find similar problems, but no solution. Then I noted the following line in the console:

gpg: NOTE: old default options file '~/.gnupg/options' ignored

The ‘options’ file has been obsoleted, gnupg uses gpg.conf now. I checked, indeed the contents of ‘options’ are also present in gpg.conf. Moving ‘options’ away and restarting Thunderbird solved the problem.

Moreover, it also solved my password problem, I now get the password prompt and can happily sign my email.