Are unaccepted chats downloaded anyway?

Mutual Help
1

Hypothetical Scenario:
Some spammer start sending me emails while I am away from my phone(or I am distracted), do DC download all messages??? (downloading messages have a cost to me)
If the answer is “yes”, I think that messages from unapproved contacts should not be downloaded by DC(only download the headers), and an option(button?) to see the full message, should be provided.

Delta Chat version

0.92

Expected behavior

Unwanted messages are not fully downloaded, just the headers are downloaded.

Actual behavior

Messages from unaccepted chats are fully downloaded, I guess.

2

Stable version 0.20:
Action:
I sent to DC email plain text message from another email account, from program that have no clue about autocrypt or DC.

Result:
DC didn’t picked that message.

So, no worry about spammers

3

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core/issues/230

4

it should have shown it as a contact request!!!

5

Yes, it in contact requests - I called it SPAM folder :slight_smile:
I think if one would implement the feature we talked in another thread (download unseen messages only) then that option may put restriction on contact requests too.
Actually it’s easier for this case, since it isn’t encrypted message, so DC may pull only headers from the IMAP and to display a message one need explicitly click on received subject to pull the whole message from IMAP server. So if “download unseen messages only” option activated it can affect workflow how DC pulling unencrypted messages, or it might be a dedicated option in settings that enforce to download only headers for unecrypted messages.

6

well, I call it “Contact Requests inbox” and “the SPAM” is getting downloaded costing a lot of money to me!!!

7

I think this issue here is an important one and the dev team is aware of it and up
to now there weren’t the ressources to cover that (@r10s).

For example K9 has some settings to restrict direct download of messages greater
than a specific size (32kb, 64kb, …).

DC should have a similar feature and could work similar to K9.

I think this would help a lot but this approach needs to be specified properly before
development. :wink:

2 Likes
8

Yeah, and options like “Do not download media” that allow me to decide if I want to download a big message or just ignore it, for example showing me in a image message a button [DOWNLOAD IMAGE (2MB)] so I can view the size and decide whether to download the attachments or not.

1 Like
9

@r10s
I think the spec(s) for the approach of this issue (and other basic ones too) should be collected somewhere in the wiki to show them clearly for everyone. This would prevent many repeated questions of users and makes development discussions easier and even FAQ could target to that.

1 Like
10

Here is the editable (wiki) entry. It includes a description of the current default usage mode, and is exactly there to collect the problems and corresponding solutions.