How to view OMEMO encrypted messages from Monal?

[TheSenPie]

I've been using Jabber on my phone with Conversations for a while. I opened my chats in Monal and tried to load old messages, however, I get "Message was encrypted with OMEMO and can't be decrypted anymore." How can I fix it?

[tmolitor-stud-tu]

I'm sorry, that's precisely one of the main properties of OMEMO encryption: A person/adversary getting hold of the current encryption key should not be able to decrypt previous messages. That means you can't decrypt older messages on a new client. If you uninstalled Conversations and then reinstalled it, it wouldn't have been able to decrypt your old messages, too. There are other encryption methods, that allow decryption of old messages, like PGP (the old standard) or OX (the new standard). Implementing OX in Monal is on our ToDo-list, Conversations currently only supports the old PGP standard (I don't know if OX is planned, too).

[TheSenPie]

I see, thank you. I guess I'll stay away from OMEMO from now on.