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How to make Thunderbird 91 work with Yubikey 5? Works with 32-bit Thunderbird, but not 64-bit.

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  • Last reply by xiconfjs

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Hello, I received a Yubikey 5 and all is working fine using GPG with it, except integration with Thunderbird on Windows.

I followed this guide: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards including 64 windows section

I was able to successfully send mail to myself, but then thunderbird failed at decrypting this message: Thunderbird is indicating that key is not available and I see no prompt from gpg-agent. Key is correctly declared as GPG external.

If I try to decrypt tis email by storing it on file and using gpg in command line, it works fine: agent is asking for Yubikey PIN and gpg is decrypting the message. But this is an awful workaround, not user friendly at all.

I also did sanity check by sending to myself a message encrypted with a key generated by Thunderbird: all is working fine, the message is decrypted within Thunderbird.

=> How do you make Thunderbird decrypt message encrypted with key stored in Yubikey? How do you make the gpg-agent called by thunderbird?

Hello, I received a Yubikey 5 and all is working fine using GPG with it, except integration with Thunderbird on Windows. I followed this guide: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards including 64 windows section I was able to successfully send mail to myself, but then '''thunderbird failed at decrypting this message''': Thunderbird is indicating that key is not available and I see '''no prompt from gpg-agent'''. Key is correctly declared as GPG external. If I try to decrypt tis email by storing it on file and using gpg in command line, it works fine: agent is asking for Yubikey PIN and gpg is decrypting the message. But this is an awful workaround, not user friendly at all. I also did sanity check by sending to myself a message encrypted with a key generated by Thunderbird: all is working fine, the message is decrypted within Thunderbird. => How do you make Thunderbird decrypt message encrypted with key stored in Yubikey? How do you make the gpg-agent called by thunderbird?

Modified by Wayne Mery

Chosen solution

I managed to finally make it work by using the 32 bit version of Thunderbird (although my OS is Windows 10 64 bit).

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Chosen Solution

I managed to finally make it work by using the 32 bit version of Thunderbird (although my OS is Windows 10 64 bit).

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AVsociaux said

I managed to finally make it work by using the 32 bit version of Thunderbird (although my OS is Windows 10 64 bit).

Yes and 1000 times, yes! Thank you for your testing and providing the only working solution (more like a work-around) for this problem. Do you have any more information on why it's that case for a bug report?


Thanks xiconfjs