PGP: encrypt all parts as one or each separate

Question

When I receive emails in my K9-Mail on Android with APG installed some mails I can press "decrypt" right away inside the email, to read it, and some others, I only get the encrypted message as an attachment and I have to open it externally and decrypt it with copy and paste in APG. I guess the reason is, that some people encrypt the message as whole and some select each separate.

Where do I find the option in Thunderbird enigmail to encrypt all parts of an email as one or each separate?

Answer 1

I do not have K9 mail and therefor cannot verify my guesses, but in the end there are only two options in sending OpenPGP encrypted mail:

• Inline OpenPGP messages just include the encrypted content as message body, without OpenPGP support you would read something like this example taken from Wikipedia:

    -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
    Charset: ISO-8859-1
    Version: GnuPG v1.5.0 (GNU/Hurd)
  
    eM3IyLmXvKp7zVTTwEU6Sbws0mUqvi4XwqNTuBwcn/aNQe6lTj+u26Bd7+kmEH02
    Lj0tgPsP6+4A5b7Rzbf/I08z12LUJjyVXw4M/rSzJkrcpLN24iB/IcT0g1+HdLJF
    [...]
    nGqQbYRqMi64GCZ+4m0cSvQaIF9WOhSQDXR4KndYSc8/jiV2D+Ru5JH8j8Zgih9R
    fha90PPvd01OPhfrRs/Awt61AvOV9stlO9ZTqO/dozl33FMW
    =xP1s
    -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
  

• OpenPGP/MIME might show up as attachments, when for example the message body, signature, and actual attachments are encrypted as individual parts.

OpenPGP/MIME encoding is actually preferred over inline OpenPGP, especially when signing mails: with inline encoding, the recipient actually will see the OpenPGP message headers, which might confuse recipients not familiar with OpenPGP.