Using GnuPG with Thunderbird

Support Software & Applications
1

Hi.

My desktop environment is Xfce and I use Seahorse to manage my passwords and encryption keys. It turns out Thunderbird only seems to support OpenPGP. The only workaround I could find was to export my public and private keys from Seahorse and import them into Thunderbird’s key manager. However this makes two copies of my keys, which I want to avoid.

Besides, Thunderbird doesn’t seem to protect the keys with encryption contrary to Seahorse, as hinted in that (French) Ubuntu post: seahorse [Wiki ubuntu-fr] — this article is old however and I don’t know if it still applies. I have see an extension available but it’s outdated (dates back to 2013 IIRC). Searching for Seahorse from “Tools and extensions” only brings up a theme… Is there a way to use Seahorse with Thunderbird¹?

Thanks in advance.

¹ Thunderbird is the only tool I’m using that gives me a hard time with GnuPG.

2

Since a few years, Thunderbird manages its keys independently from your local gpg keyring.

You can only export from Seahorse (if that’s possible) and import them in Thunderbird.

3

Set mail.openpgp.allow_external_gnupg to true.

4

So this basically means I’ll have to manage two copies of my keys, optionally with two different (set of) expiry dates… if I don’t pick the habit to only export from seahorse and not manage my keys from Thunderbird, is that correct?

That is the first thing I had done. No longer works.