add "learn more"-button beside manage-keys section, link to #importkey

[ell1e]

Sorry if it's just me being silly, but I think from the UI it's not quite clear what exact format the key import dialog wants. It says "PGP Key" in the filter below, but it doesn't say if it wants one of the plain text formats or which, and my actual *.pgp key files aren't shown, and there is no reason given and seemingly no way to make the dialog actually show them. If I am meant to convert them to a specific format that's fine, but I would need to know which, since it's seemingly not telling me what file extension it's even filtering for. Unless it's written somewhere obvious and I just missed it, in that case my apologies.

• Operating System (Linux/Mac/Windows/iOS/Android): Linux
• Delta Chat Version: Desktop v1.46.8 Core v1.142.12 SQLite 3.45.3 electron 30.3.1 node 20.15.1
• Expected behavior: the UI says more clearly what key format and file extension is expected, and for "PGP key" any *.pgp files should probably show up
• Actual behavior: I can't import my PGP key files and the UI doesn't seem to give any obvious clue as to why
• Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Have key files with .pgp extension 2. Open "File" > "Settings" and go to "Advanced", 3. Click on "Import Secret Keys", 4. Try to pick the key files from step 1 but they don't show up
• Screenshots:
• Logs:

[ell1e]

After some more investigation, there seem to be potentially multiple issues here:

• The .pgp key file I have has similar contents to an .asc file which Delta Chat seems to expect. I suggest that Delta Chat should both communicate what file extensions it is filtering for, and it should probably also allow other common extension choices like .pgp or .key that might contain a similarly text-encoded key.

• Delta Chat doesn't seem to support keys with a passphrase, which I assumed up to now is actually how most GPG keys for personal signing and encrypting are used. Importing such a key seems to cause the error IMEX failed to complete: invalid input which the average user likely wouldn't understand. Even if the user understood that the problem is the passphrase, I don't t think it's desirable to encourage the user to remove it on the source file before importing it. So I hope perhaps some day this can be supported, it would make that feature more realistically useful in real world scenarios.

• (Minor:) There doesn't seem to be some button right next to the import/export menu entries to list all known keys, despite the import dialog suggesting all previous keys are kept somewhere. If that is true, perhaps the user should be able to see which ones are stored so far.

[r10s]

there are quite some information available at https://delta.chat/en/help#importkey , we could improve that (if needed) and link there, as we do already in other cases (via a "Learn More" button or so)

note, to keep thing actionable, we'll focus in this issue on helping the user to understand the current state.

the removal of the passphrase is out of scope of this issue, this is better done by external tools as otherwise the user would also expect to enter a passphrase any time delta chat is opened, which is not how delta chat works currently. however, there is a feature proposal in the forum

[r10s]

k, after a quick internal discussion, we'll add a "Learn More" button beside "Manage Keys" that will link to #importkey in the internal offline help (this is same as https://delta.chat/en/help#importkey).

this will make the existing information easier accessible, directly where questions may occur. the "manage keys" functions are only for advanced power users anyways and a "help page" explaining things seems appropriate because of the complexity of classic GPG & Co. if needed, we can improve the help, as we already did several times in the past.

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/pull/3328 and https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios/pull/2309 show how this could look like, including screenshots.

in case of desktop, we do not have a dedicated "Manage Keys" dialog. i would be fine with just adding the "Learn More" button at the end of the "Encryption" section ...

... though combining them to a "Manage keys" dialog as on android/ios would be even nicer :)