Could you find the sender's Public PGP (GPG) key from an encoded message?
2 Answers
Encrypted messages only contain the recipients' key IDs (and even that can be disabled).
You can only find the sender's key ID if the message was also signed – but the signature is encrypted too, so you're out of luck.
Either way, you would only find the key ID, not the key itself.
Correct, what @grawity said.
Additionally, some email clients do send the senders public key as another attachment automatically.
And/or you can search for the sender's public key on a keyserver using command line:
gpg --search-keys [email protected]
or alternatively on the keyserver's web interface, like http://pgp.mit.edu/ Sender must have uploaded the key to the keyserver, of course.