This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Disable auto-decrypting PGP emails

more options

Is there a way to disable Thunderbird from decrypting PGP messages automatically?

I had asked on reddit and a user suggested to use the config editor and change temp.openpgp.autoDecrypt to false. After setting to False, nothing changed. It stays as False after restarting Thunderbird though.

What I'm wanting to do is to be able to see the PGP encrypted message and then click a button to decrypt it.

I'm using Thunderbird 115.7.0 (64-bit) on windows 10.

Is there a way to disable Thunderbird from decrypting PGP messages automatically? I had asked on reddit and a user suggested to use the config editor and change ''temp.openpgp.autoDecrypt'' to false. After setting to False, nothing changed. It stays as False after restarting Thunderbird though. What I'm wanting to do is to be able to see the PGP encrypted message and then click a button to decrypt it. I'm using Thunderbird 115.7.0 (64-bit) on windows 10.

All Replies (1)

more options

From Kai E: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/kaie/

No, we don't support it at this time. However, there's a workaround you could use.

You could enable the feature which I had described here: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/e2ee/Tdc427a8b0255b85a

The feature is available in the Thunderbird 115.x stable release, however, it still needs to be explicitly enabled, by changing preference mail.openpgp.passphrases.enabled to true, as described in that article.

One you make that change, you can view the properties of your own key, and set a passphrase. Afterwards, every time you click an encrypted message, Thunderbird will prompt you to enter the passphrase to allow decryption.

If you don't want decryption, you can cancel the prompt.

(We intend to add a cache in the future, to make it more convenient to use the passphrase, without having it to enter every time. That work is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1834577 - If you use the workaround, you'll have to set the timeout to 0 in the future, after we implement bug 1834577.)

Modified by Bogomil Shopov - Бого