On July, 19th, @werner wrote:

You need to wait a bit more.

I've been informed that this apparently is an enigmail-bug: https://sourceforge.net/p/enigmail/bugs/687/

I think it would be the right thing.

I'm developing Schleuder, the OpenPGP-featuring mailing list manager.
If I'm receiving an empty list of public keys from GPGME I currently don't know
if there are no keys, or if the keyring couldn't be read. Thus I can't properly
decide what to do: try to fetch keys? I would run into the same problem when
trying to import them. Return an error message? Which one?

This has led repeatedly to confusion e.g. when people imported a key into a
schleuder-list's keyring in the shell as root, which results in changed
ownership of the keyring-files by gpg. Next Schleuder couldn't read the keyring
anymore and maybe refused operation because it couldn't verify any incoming
email any more — instead of giving a helpful error message that points to the
cause: lacking filesystem permissions.

Currently my only chance is to manually check the permissions of all files that
might be involved in an operation. That is working around a bug, in my eyes.

Do you have an idea when you would try to fix this? Within the next weeks or
rather months?