Re: decrypt and trusting certs

["Albrecht Dreß" <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Dear Michael:

> I can't de-install gnupg. A lot of packages depend on it, even critical ones (for example apt). Can I tell balsa to use a certain version or force it somehow to use gpg2?

Ah, yes, same for me here (ubuntu), sorry for the confusion!

When you 'configure' balsa, the script checks first for gpg2, and sets it for gpgme.  So, if you have it installed, balsa will always use the new version (grep for GPG_PATH in the sources).

> This worked. I can now check your certificate. However, it does not turn green but stay on yellow. Saying that it has a good signature but is not valid enough (whatever that means).

See the (terribly outdated) documentation here: <http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-dreszal/balsa/balsa23-secure-mail.html>.  If you trust me (do you? ;-), you can use gpa to change the trust of my public key, or counter-sign it using your key.  Please see the gpg howto for details.

The "get key" button in Balsa if the kpublick key is not in your key ring simply calls gpg2 in the background to retrieve the key from the configured key server (the same you did on the command line).  As you probably saw, this may take some time, and it relies on the proper configuration of gpg...
 
> I'm sticking to not sign my messages until I figure out what exactly the problem is. Maybe I'll switch to a gpg signing instead of S/MIME.  It seems that works a lot better so far.

As I said, you should start with running gpgsm from the command line, without Balsa.  If that works, balsa will work, too (unless I programmed complete crap).

I don't think s/mime is better or worse than gpg - it's a different concept.  S/Mime is more suitable for big organisations with a CA infrastructure or with commercial certs, while pgp is the perfect choice for private users trusting (more or less) each other.

> I wish you a wonderful vacation then!

Thanks!

Cheers, Albrecht.