Chatmail notifications for custom email server

Feature Proposal
1

Currently chatmail, while it have several advantages, makes a quite different experience to classic email because it have some limits that makes the experience quite bad:

  • Cannot choose your email address
  • Cannot access with other application
  • Cannot join public groups
  • Cannot send unencrypted emails

Those limits leave you out of most common email infraestructure, you simply cannot email most email users, so you end up with https://xkcd.com/927/ again.

It would be nice to have something like chatmail but without those limits, but that might be costly to operate and easy to abuse, that is it cannot be offered as a free service.

That said, if I understand correctly the issues, it is only an economic issue, not a technical one, it would be possible to implement that service, but to make that we would need to isolate chatmail addons so you can install the features you want/need.

I think that the main one is the notification daemon, not sure exactly how it works, but making it a separate package would allow making something like adding push notification to existing servers . Does it makes sense?

2

That’s why I love Delta Chat, so it’s for maintaining stability.

I do not use chat mail, although I ran it on my server, I did not like it just because of these restrictions, the convenience there is only one thing, that with one click on the go you can create an address on the server and start communicating, but only in it. Maybe IROH unites other chat mails among themselves as a federation, but still not that.

For me, as for most other users, the importance of DC is that it does not deviate from its main task, it is a classic email. The ability to send and read emails across the entire federation of mail servers around the world, this is freedom.

This is the direction we should be moving in. And all the functionality will hopefully catch up soon, thanks to the joint work. (As well as the “uncompressed” tab of media attachments in the settings, which I have been asking for for years).

I advise you to just raise your mail server and configure your preferences yourself, I’ve been using it myself for many years and no problems.

3

Would be nice to have some general documentation / instructions of how the notification proxy works.

If you want to make that package/guide, the source code for chatmail is on GitHub - deltachat/chatmail: chatmail service deployment scripts and docs.

Some of the changes that will probably come soon / are planed:

  • more privacy by encrypting the device token to the notification proxy, so the chatmail server never sees the device token.
  • make documentation about how the protocol works and a blogpost
  • (less concrete plans):
    • custom endpoints to allow for usage with custom unified push servers or other apps (other email apps or forks of deltachat) → so to have an api that calls a web hook on new messages, like JMAP PUSH (but that requires a protocol to make sure the web hook endpoint is valid, so it can not be abused for DDOS)
    • official standardisation once we feel like everything is figured out

That said, if I understand correctly the issues, it is only an economic issue, not a technical one, it would be possible to implement that service

absolutely. currently the core team is busy with other things. Though we are happy to help if you want to do it and have questions.