The #1 reason why this happens is because a valid PGP block must have five dashes before and after the text on the BEGIN and END lines, and missing a single dash will cause it to be unrecognized by the PGP program. You may have missed the first or last dash when copying, or the vendor may have missed the first or last dash when pasting the message. This happened to someone the other day. They were copying all the text, but the vendor had only posted 4 dashes before the text on the BEGIN line. You need to count the dashes and manually add them if there are fewer than five on each side. It should look like this -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- <encrypted message> -----END PGP MESSAGE-----