The Lost Passphrase
I've just had a fascinating experience that I wanted to share here. For those not familiar with it, GnuPG is a system for digitally signing and encrypting emails and other data. Since I created my GnuPG key pair, I used to sign all my outgoing emails, but unfortunately this caused many troubles to those not familiar with digital signatures. I often received replies from people not able to view my emails in MS Outlook (because it ignores standards), or found random garbage at the beginning/end and thought the message was corrupted (not realizing that the actual message was in between). Until a couple of weeks ago or so when I decided to only sign messages when required, or when the receiving party is familiar with GPG. And it just happened that I didn't have to sign any emails until tonight. I clicked "send" and a window popped up asking me for the key's passphrase (a long password). I sat there for a while trying to remember what my passphrase was. I entered one but it was wrong. I tried a couple more but no luck. Finally, I realized that I forgot my passphrase!
