[arch] kmail and s/mime certificates

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Hello everyone!

It's been  a long time since this question was asked, but since I found the 
solution yesterday, I'll post it here, just in case anyone wants to use KMail 
with S/MIME support.
 
On Thursday 27 April 2006 19:16, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I am trying to import a certicate in pkcs12 format to kmail to be able to
> sign e-mails. The following errors are only shown:
>
>   An error occurred while fetching the keys from the backend:
>   Unsupported protocol
>   No backends found for listing keys. Check your installation.
>
>
> Moreover, when I try to manually start Kleopatra I get a similar error:
>
>   An error occurred while fetching the certificates from the backend:
>   Unsupported protocol
>

I got a similar error by kleopatra, namely "The crypto backend could not be 
initialized", which I suppose is the same error but from a different version 
of kdepim (mine is 3.5.4).

These errors are caused by the lack of S/MIME support in gpgme, which KMail 
uses for its OpenPGP / S/MIME backend. The solution is fairly simple: you 
have to compile gpgme (using ABS if you like) *after* you have installed 
gnupg2 on your system (which provides S/MIME functionality through the gpgsm 
binary). If that is the case, gpgme's configure script will automatically 
detect the gpgsm binary and compile-in S/MIME support. After that, you can 
follow the simple instructions at 
http://kmail.kde.org/kmail-pgpmime-howto.html and get full GPG crypto support 
in KMail. I haven't actually tried signing yet, but at least the whole 
framework (including Kleopatra and importing certificates) seems to work 
normally.

Perhaps gnupg2 should be added as a dependency for gpgme, so that a stock Arch 
system would have S/MIME support working out of the box.

Cheers, 
Apollon