Unable to decrypt .gpg file using emacs but command line gpg works

Question

I have an accounts.org.gpg file. I can open it using gpg directly:

$ gpg -d ./accounts.org.gpg 

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Omair Majid <removed@removed>"
4096-bit RSA key, ID 7CC8AAC6, created 2012-01-18 (main key ID 66484681)

gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key, ID 7CC8AAC6, created 2012-01-18
    "Omair Majid <removed@removed>"
+TITLE: Accounts
<rest of output removed>

But I can't open the same file using Emacs. Trying to open it in emacs gives me an error:

epa-file--find-file-not-found-function: Opening input file: Decryption failed, No secret key: E295ECEC7CC8AAC6

Is there something I need to configure on the emacs side to make this work?

For some additional background, I created this file on another machine (using the same version of Emacs), on which Emacs could read/write to that file just fine. I then copied over the contents of ~/.gnupg over to this machine. And now gpg can still read it, but Emacs can't.

EDIT: Could this be a gpg1 vs gpg2 difference?

$ gpg2 --decrypt accounts.org.gpg 
gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID E295ECEC7CC8AAC6
gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

How was the Emacs on the other machine (using same configuration, same version of Emacs (25.1) and same OS (Fedora 24 x86_64, same version of gpg and gpg2 packages)) read from it and write to it. Anyway using,

(setq epg-gpg-program "/usr/bin/gpg")

Still results in the same error.

Answer 1

You do not say which OS nor version of emacs you have.

I solved yesterday exactly the same problem in OSX and emacs 25.1 using information from this link: http://colinxy.github.io/software-installation/2016/09/24/emacs25-easypg-issue.html

I ran these commands:

brew unlink gnupg2 gpg-agent dirmngr
brew uninstall gnupg2 gpg-agent dirmngr
brew install gnupg21
ln -s /usr/local/bin/gpg2 /usr/local/bin/gpg

and set the pinentry mode in my emacs conf file:

(setf epa-pinentry-mode 'loopback)