Hi!
I would like to request this suggestion made here.
I would suggest adding a “use an existing email adress” button more visible at first boot.
Thank you
3 Likes
What is the advantage of using an existing email address? (And what the downsides??)
- all chatmail relay support instant PUSH notifications, which is important esp. for iOS - using classic email, delivery may take longer
- chatmail addresses allow instant onboarding with one tap
- chatmail relay are more reliable as classic servers, which e.g. often do greylisting, do ip reputation, have random limits of how many messages to send - using a “good” classic server is fine as well, but they’re hard to find. virtually all of “big tech” are broken - therefore it is just easier to use chatmail
read on e.g. at https://chatmail.at, Instant Onboarding and Instant Delivery
for these reasons, we consider “Use an existing email address” pretty nerdy and only doable for ppl really knowing what they’re doing, and do not tune the option up - otherwise this is a footgun for too many avg. users 
2 Likes
Two more advantages of using Chatmail accounts:
- In the case you use -for your classic email- a classic email client with notifications, that classic email client won’t bother you with unnecessary notifications of Delta Chat messages.
- You won’t receive unencrypted classic emails on Delta Chat. This confusing thing can be solved by manually setting the “Chats Only” option as unfortunately this is not the default option by now.
Regarding advantages of using an existing email address, I can think of:
- Everyone who knows your email address knows your Delta Chat address
- You can quickly start a Delta Chat conversation without using any QR or link, you just need the recipient’s email address (I think this is not possible with Chatmail accounts as they require P2P-encrypted communications since the very first message).
When starting a Delta Chat conversation with existing email addresses (without using any QR or link exchange), your first message will be unencrypted, but it will automatically include your public key, so the recipient’s answer will already be encrypted with your public key. They will also include their public key in their first answer so the 2-way P2P communications gets established. So the only unencrypted message would be the first one and, without exchanging or configuring anything, P2P communications will automatically take place. However, in order to avoid potential Person In The Middle attacks, both sides should manually verify their keys (fingerprints on “Encryption Info”) through a secure parallel channel.
So, when in a hurry, using existing email addresses lets you quickly start deltachatting and then later at some time do the key verification.
Good points, and to add to this some other advantages of using an existing email address is you won’t miss any messages even if you turn your phone off for a few weeks, you can keep messages archived on the server if you want to, and your account probably won’t be deleted after just a few months of inactivity.