Chatmail technical questions

Mutual Help
1

Hello :wave:,
I’m really impressed with the speed that Chatmail offers.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information about the attachment size and the maximum number of addresses one can send emails to. The last one is particularly important for the maximum group and broadcast list size.
Does anyone know more?

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2

I don’t know the limit, but if it is bigger than 50, it will work fine, Delta Chat is already aware of such limits and if a group has more than 50 members it will send messages in batches of 50 recipients, some providers like nauta.cu allow only 20 members per email so delta chat is aware of such limit via the provider db

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however, notice that such big groups are not recommended, I recommend to use private groups only for small groups of friends and family, if you create a super big group with lets say 100 people it will become hard to use, because delta chat groups are “peer to peer” that is: every peer is admin of the group and manages group state locally so it is easy that groups start to get inconsistent since there is not a single central server to query the group state

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4

Thanks for the information. :+1:

That doesn’t bother me because I’m not a fan of too large groups anyway.
I am just generally interested in where the technical limits are.

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5

Hallo Raiden,
hier steht 60 Nachrichten pro Minute: DeltaChat Blog
VG Frank

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6

Kinda technical question, I didn’t want to start a new topic so I’m asking here: is there a way to reset or change one’s password on a chatmail instance? This could be an issue when you forget or simply don’t know your credentials (random address). And yes, I suppose you could just get another account, but what if you’ve chosen your unique address and want to keep it?

7

is there a way to reset

To do that, chatmail servers would need more personal info like security questions, we aim to avoid that.

“no backup no pity” (really everyone should make backups of stuff that is important)

There is no way to verify that you really own the account if you forget everything. If you want this you need to take a provider that offers this service, maybe by sending you a letter to your physical mailbox with a verification code or sth like that.

change one’s password on a chatmail instance?

The idea is that you don’t ever get in contact with the password, there is no way to change it yet, maybe there are valid reasons to add such things in the future.

Chatmail aims to be a solution for the “I wanna try DC, but don’t have an email account ready” use case, basically solving our onboarding problem.

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8

Thanks for the detailed answer! I was kinda suspecting for this to be the case. And yeah, most use cases won’t really require knowing your password, not to mention resetting it. Thanks again :+1:t2:

9

In this guide GitHub - chatmail/server: chatmail service deployment scripts and docs on chatmail server there is a great section: “Migrating chatmail server to a new host”

My question is, can we maybe split the migration process in two steps:

  1. Backup - download all the necessary files from the server
  2. Restore - restore the files to the server

and implement the steps in two commands:

  1. scripts/cmdeploy backup
  2. scripts/cmdeploy restore [new_ip_address]

So it’s kind of a feature request, but I’m not sure it’s a good way to do that. So, what do you all think?

10

Yes, backups are important, but there appears to be conflicting advice about this while encrypted backups still aren’t supported yet. Encrypted backups appear to be one of the most overlooked features on the wishlist for Delta Chat! And there are some additional ways the backup process can be made smoother.

While I can always use another app to encrypt the backup files myself, I don’t know if telling my contacts who aren’t familiar with encryption to download another app just to encrypt backups is the best advice.

11

I really like cmdeploy for automation of deploy tasks. I want to improve it futher, and propose following additions:

  1. Configure Fail2Ban with rational settings - as part of cmdeploy run, or as additional command, e.g. cmdeploy fail2ban
  2. Reduce logs retention time to 1-2 hours, including JournalCtl as part of cmdeploy run or as additional command, e.g. cmdeploy reduced_logs_retention_time
  3. Allow reading logs and more stats (e.g. number of registered users) using cmdeploy logs

I want to prepare pull requests with such improvements, when I have time, but feel free to criticize this ideas or make improvements yourself!