Need help configuring gpg-agent problems with Ximian Evolution Mail

[skoona]

Folks,
Off and on I have tried to configure gnupg to work with Evolution with no real sucess. Today, If i need to include my gpg signature in email I must;
A. open a command window, run $ gpg-agent --daemon ...
B. it spits out a GPG_AGENT_INFO string that I cut and paste back to the command line, with an 'export' command added. Next I echo $GPG_AGENT_INFO to be sure it set.
C. then I can 'launchmail', and do my mailing etc without any issue after the first email. (first email - pinentry and gpg-agent ask for secret passwords to my key via little dialog boxes) after the first email, things work fine.

If I don't take the above steps I get this error dialog message:
ERROR DIALOG
gpg: gpg-agent is not available in this session
gpg: writing to `-'
gpg: DSA signature from: "....my key info...."

I had gpg-agent added to my gnome-session-properties, much lthe same way as SSH... ssh works fine and normal. I also tried, with ` and without, adding gpg-agent to /etc/rc.d/rc.local.; not luck there either.

I did search google and read a lot of how to's, but I though I would ask here in case a FC2 user here has an answer. i.e. How did you setup gnupg to work with Evolution or email?. Right now I am not certain that gpg-agent is needed.

I'm on FC2 with the lastest custom kernel, Ximian Version 1.4.6, gnupg v1.2.4+, gpg-agent from the gnupg v1.9.5 files, and all the libs you can stand...

This is not a high priority for me, I would just like to fix it - cause its there.

Thanks :confused:

[eigen]

When I used ximian ver1.4 ( I now user Kmail much better IMHO intergrates desktop,files,crypto etc.) all I did was tools->setting->mailaccount-> your accountname->security . Once there just input the key idea that you wish to use for that account.

Also there was good article about this in a linuxjournal article a few months ago.

I looked it up but I am not going to linkify it. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7354 :)

Your lucky it linked for you :p

[skoona]

eigen,

Thanks for the response, it was useful in verifing that I have done all the right things and that FC2 is not a supported platform for evolution/Ximian. It seems that I may simply need to use a different email package. To that end, I am exploring other packages now, although I am not fully ready to give up on evolution.

[skoona]

eigen,

Was your Ximiam experience on Fedora Core 1, or Fedora Core 2 ?

[eigen]

Fedora Core 2. It worked right out of a fresh install. What problems are you having exactly.

Edit: I went back and read the original post. If you cant get it to work "normally" you could write a script that does everthing you have been doing by hand.

[skoona]

Yes, I thought about writing the script.

Although I like evolution and was planning to connect my palm up to it; it may be time to change email clients. I'm kinda stuck until I have time to figure out whats really going on. FC3 is coming, so I'm thinking I will pass on fixing it now, and be very careful when I move to FC3 to notice if it works from a formal fc3 install; then watch as I bring fc3 up to speed with all the other tools I use, to see which one breaks it. An example is "newpg" whenever I do a yum update this package breaks the update process due to unsatisfied dependancies - even though "newpg" is not installed and the so-called depends are in fact installed.... That's strange because if newpg was installed I don't think i would have this problem (newpg has the normal gpg-agent).

So from what I see, and understand from your fresh install on fc2, I will wait for FC3 and see.

James,

[eigen]

I dont know what window manager you are using but KDE intergrates all this nicely.
I am specifically refering to KGPG and KMAIL.

[skoona]

I use Gnome and evolution. I think I ran across some OLD instructions related to using newpg and gpg-agent. Installing the software needed to follow those instructions has hosed my gpg setup all around, and now even mozilla is acting up since I tried to move to firefox and thunderbird for mail support.

Sooo, it's reload and rebuild time - since rebuilding is the fastest way out - or back to a stable software profile. That's OK though, since I have tracked down a found a great many configuration and capability issues.

[skoona]

Well, I cleaned my disks and re-installed FC2 from scratch, but that wasn't what fixed it. It seems that when I setup gnupg I followed my notes and added "use-agent" in the gpg.conf file. It was this parm that forced all the other tools to look for the agent and complain that it was not present. Removing that parm from the config file immediately resolved the problem.

Needless to say, those notes are now in the circular file.