[ale] GPG question about how names appear

Michael H. Warfield mhw at WittsEnd.com
Sat Jan 17 19:28:11 EST 2009


On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 15:42 -0500, Trey Sizemore wrote:
> I notice that when I pgp sign my mails, I know see the gpg signature
> showing up with my name and the mail account(s) associated with the key
> that I setup a while back.  However, the syntax for at least one is
> wrong.  It shows "Fastmail" where it should show my name and then the
> e-mail address associated with the fastmail account.

> My question is, how do I edit this information so that going forward
> it's correct syntactically as well as how do I add additional e-mail
> addresses to be associated with the key?

	The only thing you can do is delete that uid and add a correct one.
You can't change or edit an existing uid, since that would invalidate
all the signatures on that uid anyways.  Use --edit-key, select the bad
uid, delete it, and add a new uid with the correct information.  Next
problem is if you have EVER uploaded that key to a public keyserver, you
can expect the bad uid to return if you ever freshen your signatures
from any of the public servers.  The key servers are quite aggressive at
synchronizing additional information (additional uid's) and so if one
key server has that old uid, it will make sure it's propagated back and
you'll get it back even if you've deleted it.  I still have a Compuserv
uid on my old DF1DD471 key.  So it may not even be worth the effort, in
that case, to bother trying to delete the bogus one.  If you haven't
uploaded your key to a keyserver, you can just delete it and it's gone.
The ability to expire or revoke just a uid and not a whole key or whole
subkey is an unfortunate deficiency.

	Regards,
	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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