Mixed use allows the profile of your choice to communicate with each and every person in the world. This is the second best selling point of DeltaChat (at least from my point of view).
The first selling point of DeltaChat is the possibility of choosing whatever email account you wish as your transport. And unless you are planning to remove this, the changes in 2.62 really brake many usage scenarios for very little gain.
I’d like to clarify that I embraced the changes that came with version 2. I believe the benefits surpass the inconveniences.
Version 2.62 removes freedom from users. The same result could have been achieved by adding an “allow for sending” setting to each transport, enabled by default.
For example, suppose you are in a network (country?) that restricts sending to some particular IMAP servers. You can use DC because you can add accounts that works with those servers and that is great. Imagine now that you move to another network where those IMAP servers are not accessible: In the current scenario you are forced to switch profiles. That is confusing for your not so expert contacts. Also, when you come back to the original network, trying to send though other not authorized transports may be detected and problematic.
A different situation is when you have some classic email transport to surpass the 20-day storage but the account has recipients/time restrictions for sending. You can’t tell DC not to send with those accounts. This is also the case when the classic account forbids sending when connecting through a proxy.
And finally, if you want to send a message to an uninitiated human being, you are forced to create a new profile and find another classic account for it. This makes it really difficult to lure people to the light of DeltaChat.
Also, after a few tests (at least in my case), DC keeps trying with the previously set sending relay (set with previous DC version). In case of error the message is not sent and nothing can be done about it. The automatic switching is not happening.
In any case, assuming the automation works, it is very inefficient to keep trying with transports that can’t send in the current context (as described in the previous examples).
Automation is probably the best for most regular users, but those users do not bring new people to use DC. I think the best for us (DC evangelists) and regular users could be to have the possibility to enable more than one transport for sending with all enabled by default. Ideally, it would also be great to be able to set a different proxy for each transport, but I don’t think that will happen.
What do you think about this?
A regular user will never enter the transports menu and will probably never notice the “allow for sending” setting in each transport…