Hello Nico, You cannot use gpg for public key operations but for secret key ops. Please follow the instructions for smartcards (no smartcard daemon needed obviously): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards Then you can use the external gpg with your ~/.gnupg for decryption and signing. Best wishes, NTS On 28 Nov 2020 9:36 a.m., "NicoHood" <archlinux@nicohood.de> wrote: Thunderbird 78 is in the repos for quite some time now. Can anyone please explain me what is the best way to use GPG now for email encryption? I read that Archlinux aims to use the system wide gpg keyring instead of thunderbirds builtin store. Is that still the case and is that implemented yet? Thunderbird asks me to migrate my keys, and I am not sure, if I should not wait a few more days. Having the private key in multiple places is really not the best idea in my opinion. Depending on the current state we could also add a news on the archlinux website or at least update the wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Thunderbird/Enigmail Cheers Nico