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I have a public PGP key of a recipient and I want to send an encrypted e-mail to them with Thunderbird. I don't have a PGP key pair myself. Is it possible to encrypt and send this e-mail with Thunderbird?

I can't find a way. If it's not possible, why not? I searched the Internet and found out, that PGP encryption doesn't require my PGP key. I've read that my own public key is used to encrypt the e-mail to store it in the Sent folder. I know that I need my own private key to sign the e-mail and following questions suggests that encrypted e-mails are automatically signed for security

Can't I somehow disable this to make it possible to encrypt and send an encrypted (not signed) e-mail without having my own PGP key?

Technically, it's possible to manually encrypt a message using only the recipient's public key, send the encrypted message with Thunderbird and decrypt the received message using the recipient's private key. There is only the recipient's key pair involved. Why does Thunderbird not support this?

jabaa
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2 Answers2

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If you definitely do not want your own Key you could use something like Kleopatra. Its a PGP software.

There you can click on notepad, write something, then click on recipient and uncheck every box, except the "encrypt for others", then encrypt it.

Now copy the raw PGP output into Thunderbird and send it.

This is a workaround because it’s not possible in Thunderbird itself.

Giacomo1968
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ketchup_eater
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This is very bothersome that you can't. As also mentioned in the comments Mozilla has arbitrarily or for its own reason decided to avoid providing that functionality which is easily possible, technically. You do not need any keys of your own to encrypt when you have the recipients PGP public key.

I wonder why they did this?

Another workaround is to encrypt your text in the terminal.

Write your email in a text file then do it like this :

gpg --output -  --armor --encrypt --recipient target@example.com mymessage.txt

...you just need target@example.com to be in your gpg keychain.

You then just create a plaintext email in thunderbird and copy and paste the ciphertext from the terminal into the message body, starting with the first line:

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

...and ending with last line which is similar, and all the unreadable stuff in between.

cardamom
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