Clarify difference between chatmail and classic email during onboarding

Feature Proposal
1

First, thanks for all the work you do on Delta Chat, it’s truly the best messaging application!

Since the new instant onboarding, I’ve introduced several friends to Delta Chat who have bounced off it and gone back to proprietary messaging apps.

They say, “I can message some people but not others, and I can’t post in the groupchat!”

This is because they’ve created a chatmail account, and so cannot interact with others using classic email. Of course, they’re not interested in the explanation and before I can suggest that they try “Add profile” → “Create new profile” → “Use other server” → “Classic email login” they’ve gone back to Facebook messenger.

Proposals:

  • The signup with chatmail should include some explanation that it won’t work with unencrypted plain email accounts (and groupchats that contain them).
  • That “Classic email login” be moved, so that that after choosing “Add profile” the user is presented with three options: “Create new account”, “Classic email login” and “I already have a profile”.
  • That this screen should have a short explanatory sentence, something like:

Chatmail is a secure form of email which will reject unencrypted messages. Choose “Classic email login” to communicate with people who aren’t using encryption

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2

These friends have all been using Delta Chat for Android, I haven’t seen onboarding for other platforms.

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3

This confusion was really super clear to me back when they were rolling out 1.45.x: 🧪 Help testing the upcoming v1.45.X release - #12 by kinetix

It’s almost like the app should now be forked in to two differently named apps. One that is geared toward what people understood DeltaChat to be - a nearly-instant chat client that utilized already existing email infrastructure and accounts as the back end, and the other being a chatmail service that is, of course, completely separate from already established email infrastructure.

There is now no obvious path in the client to set it up using an already established Email account (If there were, the Create New Profile page/screen would ask for your email address, not your name and a default push to nine.testrun.org), and heavy weighting to get users to use chatmail by default.

3 Likes