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### 6.5 Signed and Encrypted Messages

You can read encrypted or signed PGP or GPG messages with MH-E22. This section assumes that you already have a good understanding of GPG and have set up your keys appropriately.

If someone sends you a signed message, here is what you’ll see:

    [[PGP Signed Part:Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>]]
    This is a signed message.

    [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

If the key for the given signature is not in your keychain, you’ll be given the opportunity to fetch the key from a key server and verify the key. If the message is really large, the verification process can take a long time. You can press `C-g` at any time to cancel23.

If the signature doesn’t check out, you might see something like this:

    [[PGP Signed Part:Failed]]
    This is a signed message.
    This is garbage added after the signature was made.

    [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

If someone sends you an encrypted message, MH-E will ask for your passphrase to decrypt the message. You should see something like this:

    [[PGP Encrypted Part:OK]]

    [[PGP Signed Part:Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>]]
    This is the secret message.

    [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

    [[End of PGP Encrypted Part]]

If there is a problem decrypting the message, the button will say:

    [[PGP Encrypted Part:Failed]]

You can read the contents of this button using the methods described in Viewing Attachments. If the message were corrupted, you’d see this:

    [[PGP Encrypted Part:Failed]
    Invalid base64 data]

If your passphrase were incorrect, you’d see something like this:

    [GNUPG:] ENC_TO CD9C88BB610BD9AD 1 0
    [GNUPG:] USERID_HINT CD9C88BB610BD9AD Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>
    [GNUPG:] NEED_PASSPHRASE CD9C88BB610BD9AD CD9C88BB610BD9AD 1 0
    [GNUPG:] BAD_PASSPHRASE CD9C88BB610BD9AD
    gpg: encrypted with 1024-bit RSA key, ID 610BD9AD, created 1997-09-09
          "Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>"
    gpg: public key decryption failed: bad passphrase
    [GNUPG:] BEGIN_DECRYPTION
    [GNUPG:] DECRYPTION_FAILED
    gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available
    [GNUPG:] END_DECRYPTION

    gpg exited abnormally: '2'

The appearance of the buttons is controlled by the faces `mh-show-pgg-good`, `mh-show-pgg-bad`, and `mh-show-pgg-unknown` depending on the validity of the signature. The latter is used whether the signature is unknown or untrusted.

The ‘`pgg`’ customization group may have some settings which may interest you. See The PGG Manual.

#### Footnotes

### (22)

This feature depends on post-5.10 versions of Gnus. MIME Security with OpenPGP is documented in RFC 3156. However, MH-E can also decrypt old-style PGP messages that are not in MIME format.

### (23)

Unfortunately in the current version, the validation process doesn’t display a message so it appears that MH-E has hung. We hope that this will be fixed in the future.

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