Title: enigmail vs. pinentry
Date: 2014-12-09
Lang: en

I recently got a new Laptop and installed it with [Gentoo](http://www.gentoo.org) 64 bit. Along the process I had a hard time getting [Thunderbird](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/), the [enigmail](https://enigmail.net/home/index.php) plugin and [gnupg](https://www.gnupg.org/) to play together nicely.

I had everything set up correctly (or so I thought) and the proper keys in place. But kept getting strange error messages from enigmail about missing passwords.

After hours of pointless poking around I found the culprit: gpg is trying to request passphrases via `/usr/bin/pinentry` but I did not even have a pinentry package installed.

So as a hint for anyone who may stuble over the same problem as I did:

    emerge app-crypt/pinentry

and dont' forget to enable one of the GUI keywords e.g. `gtk` or `qt`. To make sure that the pinentry link points to the correct binary run

    eselect pinentry list
    
and select the correct variant.

Enjoy sending gpg secured mails!