Arch Linux

nathanzachary

Member

Registered: 2016-08-14

Posts: 7

Thunderbird loses account information and keys periodically

Hello,

I installed and maintain an Arch installation on a friend's computer.  Seemingly randomly, her Thunderbird will either:

1) Lose her private key even though it hasn't changed on the filesystem
2) Lose her account information (saved passwords, in particular)

In the first situation, when trying to decrypt a message that should be fine, the error message reads:

"The secret key that is required to decrypt this message is not available."

Then, when going to the key manager, the error message is:

"This key is not usable as a personal key, because the secret key is missing!"

At first I thought that it might be filesystem corruption, but all other applications seem to be working as intended.  I also tried completely clearing her Thunderbird profile and creating a new one.

Any thoughts on next steps for troubleshooting?

Thank you.

Cheers,
Nathan Zachary

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,256

Re: Thunderbird loses account information and keys periodically

Are the keys/passwords managed by Thunderbirds OpenPGP or an external application ?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Thunde … rnal_GnuPG may help to verify how things are setup .

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2023-04-14 09:52:44)

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

nathanzachary

Member

Registered: 2016-08-14

Posts: 7

Re: Thunderbird loses account information and keys periodically

Thank you for your response.  The keys are managed by Thunderbird's internal implementation.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,256

Re: Thunderbird loses account information and keys periodically

Passwords and keys are stored in different places, we should verify if both go missing .

- Tools > OpenPGP Key manager > file has several options to export/import keys , use them .
- Backup the full TB profile your friend uses , see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr … -user-data

When this happens again, try importing the keys first.
If that doesn't help,  move the profile in use somewhere and put the backupped profile back .

Incase that solves the issue, compare the 2 profile folders. I'm not 100% sure, but think passwords are (encrypted) saved in data.save.bin files .

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky