Intro

This message was originally fielded to Reddit¹

I’m encrypting some emails on my gmail, sent by an auto-encrypting app. When I try to view them in Gnus, it asks if I want to decrypt the message and, when I affirm, I just see:

Error! Result from decryption:

Decryption failed

Decryption failed

This makes sense because I haven’t given it any keys and have never done this email decryption thing. But where do I go, and what keys provide?

This is email via DeltaChat, for what it’s worth.

Answer

After fiddling around a bit with the commandline pgp, and importing both the secret and the pub file, my gnus was able to do its thing. Note that I had typed something in first with the app, but I don’t think that meant anything. I’ll see if this survives a restart. I also need to cleanup my gpg list.

• from my repo guix install gnupg

• From DeltaChat obtained pub and secret .asc files. I’m not entirely sure why it needed the secret to decrypt, but it did

• gpg --import public-key-1.asc and gpg --import private-key-1.asc

  And now my gnus, using the plugin², was able to decrypt my deltachat messages to myself (which is my primary usecase right now).

Footnotes

¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/16jfjgp/how_to_pgp_decrypt_email_with_gnus/

² The autocrypt package supports gnus, though users these days might be frustrated on NotMuch. https://github.com/emacsmirror/autocrypt