[MlMt] A MailMate hang many people may encounter…

[Bill Cole]

For the past few hours I've been pounding my head against a MailMate 
hang which I'm likely not alone with.

The latest batch of Apple Product Security emails caused MailMate to 
hang for me very reproducibly. I don't know the full explanation for 
why, but it has something to do with the GPG signatures on them. They 
recently rotated keys, so while I had many keys in my keychain for them, 
they were all expired. This shouldn't cause a hang in itself. The 
messages are structured as single plain text MIME objects including the 
signature, encoded by quoted-printable. This shouldn't cause a hang in 
itself.

I don't fully understand the hang. However, the fix was relatively 
simple: remove all the old APS keys from my GPG keychain, quit GPG 
Keychain, kill all of the orphaned gpg and gpg-agent processes you may 
have from failed attempts to open the problem messageand the process 
running /usr/local/MacGPG2/libexec/shutdown-gpg-agent (which starts at 
login.) Go to https://support.apple.com/en-us/102148 and copy the 
current key. Launch GPG Keychain, which will notice the key in the 
clipboard (if you copied it right) and prompt you to import it. Once the 
right key is in the keychain, MailMate has no problem with the messages.




-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire