Letting Enigmail use gpg-agent for passphrase caching on OSX

Since one of the recent upgrades of Enigmail (the GPG extension for Thunderbird) and completely switching to GPG version 2 on my Macbook I ended up with the situation that Enigmail did not cache the key passphrases anymore and I had to enter them over and over again. This is caused by the fact that GPG2 requires to use gpg-agent and Enigmail’s internal passphrase management cannot be used anymore. Therefore, a setup is required that enabled the gpg processes spawned by Enigmail to talk to a running gpg-agent instance. ...

May 3, 2015 · updated April 30, 2021 · 4 min