GPG should fail silently when external card is not inserted, instead of asking over and over

Question

I'm running Linux.

I have a Yubikey 4, where my GPG subkeys are stored. On the computer, gpg-agent transparently uses these keys.

The problem is when I don't have my Yubikey inserted. If anything wants to decrypt something (for example, I use pass for my passwords, including my email, which is checked on a 2-minute timer with mbsync), gpg-agent will dutifully ask me to insert the key. I would much rather it failed silently instead. Is this possible?

Answer 1

I had the same issue and ended up deleting locally the subkeys that are stored at yubikey.