Back in October, I wrote a piece about use encrypted email in Thunderbird. If you must send sensitive information via email, you should use encryption. If you do not encrypt those missiles, third parties can read the information contained in them.
You don’t want that…especially when it comes to personal or professional Information that you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands.
One of the complications of using encryption in Thunderbird (or most email clients) is that you have to track down the recipient’s public GPG key and add it to the client. Without that key, you can’t send encrypted emails to the key owner, thus rendering GPG useless.
There are many ways you can get the recipient’s public key. You can ask them to send it to you, then you’ll have to manually add it to your keychain. You can download it from the public GPG key server through your key management software.
Also: How to Add ‘Do Not Track’ to Thunderbird (and Why You Should)
Fortunately, there is another way that can be hidden from view. This less obvious method is much easier than the other two options, so I highly recommend trying these simple steps first.
How to determine user’s GPG key in Thunderbird
Let me show you how.
Request
The only thing you need is a running instance of Thunder and an email from the recipient in question. I will illustrate with Thunderbird version 102.5.0 above Pop!_OS Linux but the process is the same, no matter what operating system you are using.
If you are using an older version of Thunderbird, I recommend upgrading to the latest version, so that you take advantage of the new features and (more importantly) all the security patches that have been applied. use.
That’s all you need. Let’s make this happen.
The first thing you have to do is open Thunderbird.
Next, find an email from the recipient with the public GPG key you want to add (so you can send them encrypted email).
Open emails from recipients by clicking the item in the top right pane of Thunderbird.
In the reading pane (bottom right), right-click the email address in the From field, and then click OpenPGP Key Discovery.
Downloading the recipient’s GPG key is actually a lot easier than you think. Photo: Jack Wallen
Accept GPG from the recipient’s email address. Photo: Jack Wallen
encryption enabled
Now that you’ve entered the recipient’s GPG key, you can encrypt any email you send them. You can refer back to the article I quoted earlier to find out exactly how to encrypt those emails, but basically the point is to compose an email to the recipient belonging to the key you just entered and then click the Encrypt button in the compose window. Email encryption has never been so easy.
