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marianoju
Asked: 2018-12-11 01:19:14 +0800 CST

Secret key has missing trust [sic] in Thunderbird

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I have recently installed the latest version of Thunderbird (60.3.0, 64-bit) on Ubuntu 18.04 from the Snap Store. I have installed the Enigmail addon and successfully imported my private key. On startup of Thunderbird a notification is displayed:

Enigmail Information

Your secret key [...] has missing trust. We recommend that you set "You rely on certifications" to ultimate in key properties.

After opening “Key Properties” I find no option to set "You rely on certifications". Key Properties

After clicking “Certify” a notification is displayed:

No eligible key found for signing

No eligible key found for signing! You need at least one fully trusted secret key in order to sign keys.

How can I resolve this missing trust issue?

UPDATE

Following @dlakomski's advice I tried to change the trust setting on my private key (part of ~/.gnupg/pubring.kbx), but found it already to be set to 5 = I trust ultimately. 

gpg> save
Key not changed so no update needed.

Enigmail has found GnuPG in /snap/thunderbird/29/usr/bin/gpg2 and “Override with /usr/bin/gpg” is not an option (probably because Thunderbird was installed as a snap):

GnuPG cannot be executed with the path provided. Enigmail is therefore deactivated until you change the path to GnuPG again or until you restart the application.

Is it possible that /snap/thunderbird/29/usr/bin/gpg2 is agnostic to trust settings of keys in ~/.gnupg/pubring.kbx?

thunderbird gnupg snap enigmail

1 Answers

  1. From the command line:

    gpg --edit-key 'Your key'

    Then you should see something like that:

    gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.4; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

sec  rsa4096/0xF759E5159BD8ADB0
     created: 2017-07-13  expires: never     usage: SC
     trust: never         validity: unknown
ssb  rsa4096/0x0FDF21CEA632F8D7
     created: 2017-07-13  expires: never     usage: E
[ unknown] (1). Name Surname <[email protected]>
gpg >

    Then type:

    trust

    which shows:

    Please decide how far you trust this user to correctly verify other users' keys
(by looking at passports, checking fingerprints from different sources, etc.)

  1 = I don't know or won't say
  2 = I do NOT trust
  3 = I trust marginally
  4 = I trust fully
  5 = I trust ultimately
  m = back to the main menu

Your decision?

    This is your key, so choose option 5 and exit the program.

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