[Users] unable to read own encrypted GPG email

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2014 12:10:04 -0300, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Dec 2014 14:56:45 +0000
> Brian Morrison <bdm at fenrir.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> > > > > You need to encrypt the message with your own key as well.  
> 
> > > > Be aware that in some jurisdictions doing this means that your
> > > > email becomes subject to key recovery legislation, this may not
> > > > be your intent.  
> 
> > > And what happens if the private key is lost?
> > > I'm not kidding, I can't find some of my old keys anymore, but I
> > > still own those encrypted messages.
> > > Eternal coercive detention?
> 
> > In the UK if they think you're pretending to have lost a key then it
> > could mean a 2 year prison sentence if you can't convince a
> > judge/jury otherwise.
> 
> So if you lost your key, better delete the un-readable messages...

I still hope to find the keys someday.

Sorry, perhaps it's OT, OTOH it might be important to know about such
laws.

Doing a short web research I couldn't find such a law for Germany.
Is anybody aware about EU law and German law? UK is member of the
European Union.

What does "delete" mean?
"rm" just removes the directory entries and even "shred" doesn't ensures
that the data is overwritten [1].
So deleting old mails does mean to
1. Delete the particular mails and just keep not encrypted mails and
   encrypted mails that can be decrypted. 
2. then backup the mails
3. then shred or dd a complete partition?!
4. after that to restore the mails from the tidy up backup

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ shred --help
[snip]
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption:
that the file system overwrites data in place.  This is the traditional
way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy
this assumption.  The following are examples of file systems on which
shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all
file system modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
[snip]

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