How to locate a user’s GPG key in Thunderbird

Back in October, I wrote a piece about using encrypted email in Thunderbird. If you ever have to send sensitive information via email, you should be using encryption. If you’re not encrypting those missives, the information they contain can be read by a third party.

You don’t want that… especially when it comes to personal or professional information that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands.

One of the complexities 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 owner of the key, thereby rendering GPG useless.

There are ways you can get the recipient’s public key. You can have them send it to you, which you will then have to manually add to your keyring. You can download it from a public GPG key server through the software that manages your keyring.

Also: How to add ‘Do Not Track’ to Thunderbird (and why you should)

Fortunately, there’s another way that’s sort of hidden from sight. This less-than-obvious method is much easier than the other two options, so I highly recommend you try these simple steps first.

How to locate a user’s GPG key in Thunderbird

Let me show you the way.

Requirements

The only thing you’ll need is a running instance of Thunderbird and an email from the recipient in question. I’ll demonstrate with Thunderbird version 102.5.0 on Pop!_OS Linux but the process is the same, no matter the operating system you are using. 

If you’re using an older version of Thunderbird, I suggest you upgrade to the latest version, so you gain the advantage of new features and (more important) all the security patches that have been applied.

That’s all you need. Let’s make this happen.

Encryption enabled

Now that you’ve imported the recipient’s GPG key, you can encrypt any emails you send them. You can refer back to the post I cited earlier to find out exactly how to encrypt those emails, but it’s essentially a matter of composing an email to the recipient that belongs to the key you just imported and then clicking the Encrypt button in the composer window. Email encryption has never been so easy.