For eachcorrespondent’s public key that you want or need to use, Thunderbird 78requires that you accept the key at least once. Why does Thunderbirdautomatically enable the digital signature when I enable encryption? Messageencryption by itself only provides confidentiality of content, but it doesn’tprovide reliable information about the actual sender of the message. In theory,someone could send you an encrypted message, but fake the sender of the email,giving you a false impression of trustworthy communication. Because anencrypted email without digital signature is not really secure, it is highlyrecommended to also digitally sign emails. Thunderbird currently does not offeran option to prevent digital signing from being enabled automatically.
We mightconsider to offer this as a default Canada Email List configuration in the future. At this time,if you don’t want to send a digital signature, you must manually disable thisoption prior to sending on each encrypted email that you send. Why doesThunderbird automatically send my public key whenever I digitally sign anemail? The whole point of digitally signing a message is that the recipientwill be able to verify that the digital signature is correct. A digitalsignature cannot be verified if the correspondent’s public key is unavailable.To ensure that your recipients will be able to verify your signature, it isbest to always include your public key. At this time, we don’t provide aconfiguration option to automatically exclude your public key when digitallysigning, rather it is necessary that you manually disable it prior to sending.
My publickey is very big, because I have many signatures on it. It is too big to includeit with every signed message. Because of limitations, we currently aren’t ableto automatically minimize your key. If you want to avoid that your big key issent with each digitally signed message, you could use other software, likeGnuPG, to edit and minimize your key. Ensure you have a reliable backup of yoursecret key. Then export your key. Use other software to minimize it. Thendelete your secret key in Thunderbird, import the minimized key, and ensure toadjust your account settings to use that key. A future version of Thunderbirdmay attempt to automatically minimize the key when appropriate, but this willdepend on the future functionality in the RNP library.
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