now is the time to forget the whimpering child, become the warrior
7. Key management
Once you have Enigmail on your system, you need to populate it with keys: it's pretty useless without them. You need to have your own key pair in order to sign messages and allow anybody to send encrypted messages to you.
Furthermore, you will need the public key of a person in order to send that person an encrypted message, or to verify the signature in a message sent by that person.
Select OpenPGP → Key Management to open the Key Management window.
You can also open Key Management as a standalone application by appending -pgpkeyman to the command that runs Thunderbird / SeaMonkey, e.g. on Windows: "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\SeaMonkey\SeaMonkey.exe" -pgpkeyman.
The Key Management window shows all keys (yours and other people's) you have stored in your machine; this is called your keyring. The set of all public keys that you have collected is often called your public keyring.
Key pairs (i.e. a bundle of public key and its companion secret key) are shown in bold. Revoked or expired keys, which are invalid keys, are shown in italic.
All others are valid public keys.
If you run the Setup Wizard and generated a new key pair, or imported an existing one, it will be shown here. (If it doesn't, tick the option Display All Keys by Default.) Otherwise, the window will be empty.
By clicking the expand gadget at the left of each key, you can see the key's additional user IDs and PhotoID, if present. The columns (Key ID, Type, Key Validity, Owner Trust, Expiry, and Fingerprint) show a number of other key properties: you can choose which columns you want to see by selecting them in the rightmost gadget in the column header bar. In the rest of this chapter we'll explain what these properties mean.
The menu bar of the Key Management window allows you to operate on the keys of your keyring. To do that, select a key, and then choose a menu item. You also have most of these menu items in a pop-up menu that shows up when you right-click on a key. Some menu items will be disabled (greyed out) if the operation is not permitted on the key you selected. Some operations on a key require that you have the companion private key, so you can accomplish them on your key pair but not on other people's public keys.