[Enigmail] Enigmail hanging when importing a public key?

[Matt]

John Clizbe wrote:
> Matt wrote:
>> Is this selection (on how often to query) done in enigmail, or gnupg?
> 
> *ALL* actual key operations are handled by GnuPG. Enigmail only serves as a
> front end, generating a command line which is passed to GnuPG for execution.

As a front-end (for the purposes of ease-of-use), a program will
normally execute multiple command lines of the CLI-only program; often
to get around limitations the front-end users see. I was unaware that
enigmail's developers had made a specific conscious decision that no
more than 1 gnupg command be executed per menu selection (or button press).

There is a difference between:

for (each key in list)
gnupg {refresh this key}

and

gnupg {refresh key1, key2, key3 .....}

The first option obviously executes gnupg many times, and might be used
for any/all of the following reasons:
A) gnupg has a limit on how many keys it will accept in one call.
B) to get around max command line length imposed by the OS
C) keyservers' limit the number of keys in a query, but gnupg's limit is
higher.
D) So a single server in the round-robin pool doesn't get hit with a
"large" request, and all servers are used near equally (from the pool).
but would violate the max one gnupg call per menu item. In this case
enigmail is making the decision, not gnupg.

If A & B & C never apply then the second is obviously the better choice.