Hello everyone,
I'd like to thank everyone in advance for this help, because I've been going crazy trying to figure this out for a while.

I guess I've been watching too much of "Forensic Files" and shows like that, because I've become paranoid and very worried about people getting to my personal history on my computer, as well as my secret files. Because of this, I've been looking into encryption and the like.

Now eventually I plan to encrypt my entire drive with TrueCrypt, but for now what I'm trying to do is get Thunderbird to work with GPG. I've had GPG for a while, and I've had a key for a while; however I seem to have forgotten the password for my key, so I removed that certificate, and made a new one. The problem I'm running into, is that Thunderbird does not seem to have my keys in it's database. When I try to digitally sign an e-mail, I get this message: "you need to set up one or more personal certificates before you can use this security feature, would you like to do so now?". I've clicked "Yes" and been given the option to browse for the keys, however I can't find them anywhere, not even in .gnupg. I see pubring.gpg and secretring.gpg(or whatever it was called), but Thunderbird wants PKCS12 files. I've looked at the command line arguments for gpg, and I was able to run it with the --export option, but I don't know if that exported the public or private key, or both, and it went to stdout, so I had to pipe it to cat, but since I didn't know what the output was, I couldn't really use it. I also tried to use --export-secret-key-p12, but gpg gives me an error saying that's not a command.

So my question is, How The Heck am I supposed to get these keys into Thunderbird so I can sign and encrypt my e-mails?!


Thanks again,
-Primux

Try to use openssl to convert your key to PKCS12 format.

Are you using Enigmail http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php ?
If not, give it a try, it may be better integrated... or not.

That much kind of seemed obvious. . . How would I go about doing that?

I am already using enigmail, that's how I'm able to use the signing/encryption or at least how I should be able to. That's how the options are there I guess.