@adbenitez
Thanks for your explanations. Now I understand.
And I’m with you for managing high number groups. But one remark: people outside of a bcc group can’t subscribe by themselves because they don’t see the group. This could be done only by recipients which are in.
For me the current simple bcc group is a big step forward in contrast to having nothing 
of course, better something than nothing
btw, another reason I wanted channels, is because I need this bcc stuff in my bots, it is really slow to distribute messages one by one, but the use case is also channels, where bots distribute the messages and I need the messages to arrive as a group not as a 1:1 with the bot
@adbenitez keep in mind that channels are read-only, so they are not ideal for mega-groups, either.
BTW as soon as we have mailing lists, switching from broadcast lists to channels is going to be a 1-line-change (adding a List-Id header when sending the message). And I think that I like channels better, too.
The two solutions for the spam problem I see are:
@adbenitez
to proceed with your last message: When you want to have a broadcast message where you still want to see a group, but read only for the recipients. How would that be possible with email? When the recipient sees a group he’s able to answer. Read only in that manner is not possible. We are not on a server which could handle that. If DC should handle that
a) from the recipients perspective DC could prevent to reply to such a group or
b) from the senders perspective DC could just not route incoming messages to the sending group or
c) what about a standard MUA? As recipient You can do what you want. Reply, Reply to all and do nothing (read only)
=> not so easy :-/
There are possibilities in how to send the mail and what a receipient sees:
a) when you put some addresses in To, Cc or Bcc recipient SEES a group OR NOT if you don’t do that. These informations are in mail header and even Bcc sometimes is not deleted by mail server.
b) this is independent to whom a mail is sent for the mail server. This is another list, which a recipient never can see! This is SMTP.
I think if we are speaking here from real mailing lists (@Hocuri) there is a server in between which can do some things. The broadcast group here is much simpler. It just uses a) and b).
By the way: I don’t have any other messenger to compare 
nope. it uses BCC, but it’s not the same at all.
i would like to see:
option to show members/friends opted in
which spam problem? i’m not following the bot idea at all, still couldn’t see those bots in action…
but spam will always be a huge technical cat and mouse hurdle, sadly. even when we do get better ai… (fighting against useless stimulus is subjective and an individual, a constant battle we all have to endure in many different layers)…
that being said, it might be better to not worry too much with spam while delta doesn’t get tremendously big. even telegram have only started to show spam issues (from my user point of view) this year. obscurity is one of the best spam protections! 
I know, I don’t want channels for mega groups but for channels 
just that I would like to use the bot to be the one handling the channel, so the channel admin can avoid getting replies from users, and also to avoid the high data usage of having to send a message to a ton of users.
this is exactly what I want, just that on the bot side there would be only one group with all users and users receive the messages as 2 member groups, but well what you say could also work for me, but not usable for users that want to handle the channel directly without having to trust a bot, so in the end it is better to implement it as channels.
not allowing to reply with delta chat will, in practical terms, solve the issue, users can reply from other MUA(if you have email interactions in only chat this is no issue), or reply in private to the channel admin, DC should show the reply in private, so they will get to contact requests chat not spamming the channel. That is good enough and in practice less problematic than sending broadcast messages in private, as a direct message people will tend to reply to your messages, with the user knowing it is a channel and they shouldn’t reply and that their replies have a high probability to be ignored, they usually wouldn’t bother to try hacks to reply.
that is without bots, now with a bot, the bot will administrate the channel for you so the channel admin is protected and the bot is the one that creates the channel and sends the messages so people effectively can’t reply to channel admins
Ok, I’m with you. In DC you can handle that but from the technical point of email “prevent reply” is not really possible. Ignoring replies is the only way to prevent replies when a recipient shouldn’t do it
It is possible to set Reply-To: to some noreply address.
Keep always in mind that we are using email.
The essence of using a broadcast group is to send a message to many receipients (the broadcast group) without showing every receipient who else is receiving that message!
The receivers list is not known for every receipient! That’s the goal for that!
When a receipient replies to a message from a broadcast group I see it OK when a reply goes to a 1:1 chat. So far OK.
Say “blind group” to the “broadcast group” if you want.
Maybe that meets more your expectations. But that’s only wording
the next android release and the nightly from tomorrow will have WhatsApp-like “Broadcasts” as an “Experimental feature”. if you enable “Broadcasts Lists” at “Settings / Advanced”, you can create new broadcasts lists from the normal “New Chat” dialog.
this is how things look like:
(screenshots taken from broadcasts android ui by r10s · Pull Request #2060 · deltachat/deltachat-android · GitHub)
That’s a great 
@csb0730, thanks a lot for your preliminary work! that was really helpful to find the correct pieces of code and the correct hooks.
A great new feature. Sadhu for effort and generosity.
Two things. One to report a “strange” behaviour: if creating a list the screen would flash, possible as much times as members are selected. Aside of this optical appearance (by loading possible) all seems to work fine.
Second: Is it needed to use “bcc”? Wouldn’t it be nicer if creating “mass-mail” (sending mail to each recipient) as the recipient wouldn’t get a “hidden recipient” message and not feeling not comfortable because of such. Remembering earlier times of email: bcc was regarded as not professional and used to be seen as spam. Not sure about todays standards of recognition in regard of such.
Honestly this has never happened to me, although I have tried to create multiple broadcast lists with more than 150 contacts and have not had flash problems 
Maybe a device issue. here a screen-movie to show: https://sangham.net/_media/external/delta-chat/broadcast.mp4
If creating larger lists it would cause a black screen for about 5+sec (80 members) after longer “flash-session”, at least on the device given to use of mine.
Maybe (if even at all) more desired as further or different feature, “but”: what about (as the send isn’t put into individual conversation) if having similar “blind chat” like now (a folder like saved messages) which might store one’s mass-mail produced there, sends/saves them from here into the particular conversations with individuals or even groups?
One would be amazed even possible confused if receiving a message out of nothing if having forgotten that a mass-mail was send, given getting it later, 1h, 1 week, one year. (show full message isn’t possible to investigate the matter)
