gnupg oddities

[David Picón Álvarez]

Hi,

> gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available
>
> I get this when i try to read an email that has been encrypted to me. I
> have their public key, and they have mine. I can see my pubkey and
> seckey in ~/.gnupg and gpg is suid root. It also happens if I send an
> (encrypted) email, then go to read the email in sent items. I have
> default-recipient-self uncommented in gpg.conf


1) Are you sure the e-mail has been encrypted to you? By this I mean maybe
the person sending it made a mistake and encrypted to their own public key.


2) If you encrypt an e-mail to, let's say, me, you can't read it yourself
unless you encrypt to yourself also. This is because I'm the only one
capable to decrypt something encrypted with my pubkey. There is a tweak on
the options file, I think it's precisely default-recipient-self, which
encrypts to your own key in addition to whatever other key, so that you can
decrypt your own e-mails. Personally.

HTH,
--David.