I’ve been trying out Delta Chat with my own email address to see if I could use it to chat with family who still use email.
But every time I opened Delta Chat, it would show all my emails from all folders, making it pretty much unusable. OK I assumed that meant it must have grabbed them before my filters put them into the appropriate folder. So I selected them all and deleted.
To be clear, these all appeared in what Delta Chat called “inbox”. I only have a couple of emails in my real Inbox on my email server, as most emails are put into subfolders by filters. However it seems that Delta Chat has actually deleted all emails from my entire email account, in every subfolder.
They are not in the account’s deleted items folder.
In fact only what was already in my server’s deleted mail folder survives!
Please tell me that Delta Chat has put them in some other deleted folder and not just permanently deleted everything with no warning??
Please can anyone help me recover these messages? Thanks!
Um. IMAP is designed to mirror your email server. What is deleted in the client is supposed to be deleted on the server. I’m not sure, but I think you may have lost your mails. I’m sorry. The admin on your mailserver may be able to help if you ask promptly and they have automated backups.
It is common to tell Deltachat to just mirror one folder, usually called “DeltaChat”. This avoids the unusability. See this documentation. Then again, others do want all the mails in Deltachat.
Possibly we should have, say, a selection popup instead of this default, to avoid this situation. Would that have helped?
Thanks for the reply. I was actually trying to get it to just look at emails that came to the Delta Chat folder - I’d just changed that setting to just monitor the Delta Chat folder, and also created a filter on my server to put all family emails in there.
So when I went back to the Delta Chat message list, I was expecting it to show an empty folder (as there’s nothing in Delta Chat yet), but all my emails were still there. This combined with the fact that emails from all subfolders appear in Delta Chat’s “Inbox” made me think that it must be downloading copies locally, and the best thing to do was delete all the old emails it had downloaded so it would start again from an empty listing.
I do know that IMAP tends to mirror the server contents, but as Delta Chat didn’t show my folders or the actual content of my inbox, I thought it was doing something different.
I’d say it would be more normal to move messages into the deleted items folder rather than deleting straightaway.
I don’t think I’ve lost anything important, my emails are 99% just informative and I very rarely need to refer back to them. I’ve also just changed email provider so I probably didn’t even have 50 emails in total.
Is there definitely no deleted items folder that Delta Chat uses then?
Delta Chat keeps all messages in a local database, so you can view everything offline and even delete the mails on the server to save space, but if you delete a message in Delta Chat, it is deleted on the server as well.
Delta Chat doesn’t care much about IMAP folders; it treats it just as one big inbox in order to not miss any messages, that is unless you configure it to only look inside the DeltaChat folder.
My opinion:
If your contacts write normal non-DC emails then you should use a dedicated email account for Delta Chat and give them from your new address or write them from there.
The alternative of making filter rules to move mails to the DeltaChat folder based on contacts addresses on the same account sounds too tedious to maintain.
Other idea that could be worth an attempt:
You could make a rule to forward emails from the special contacts to a separate email account for DC and reply from there, advantage would be that you could give new contacts your new “chat”-email address instead of adding them to the filter.
delta chat really deletes emails, there is no trash folder.
ah thanks for that info. Unfortunately I can’t change email address as too many people in my family are completely clueless about anything technical! I did once try to get them to use a new address, and a load of people just didn’t understand, and others would send messages randomly to either address (to be fair, probably the fault of their email clients remembering previously used addresses).
So I’ll see how it goes with this set up. My dad won’t use WhatsApp, which the rest of the family use - not clear why as he loves Microsoft so it’s not a privacy issue. If messaging with him works well with Delta Chat I might be able to get him to use it himself, and from there it might be possible to get more family on it, especially for group chats. So that’s what I’m trying to do, get the family off WhatsApp! But with a minimum of disruption for everyone else. From what you’ve said, maybe it won’t be possible, but I’ll give it a proper try out.
Losing all my emails was a learning experience for me, and I know I got off lightly. Emails can be very valuable for people so it might be nice to offer an option to move emails to a trash folder or to not delete messages on the server when deleted locally. Or perhaps just a clear pop-up warning that messages are permanently deleted when someone connects to an email account with messages already in it.
If you meet in person, then you could also use the “instant onboarding” with a chat mail address.
For this you don’t need to remember email addresses or passwords, you just create a new profile by just typing in a nickname. And to get in contact you scan the qr code.
Disadvantage of chat mail profile is that you can not send nor receive unencrypted emails from it and you need the invite link / qr code to get in contact, because scanning that transfers the public keys for encryption.
But the advantages are:
easy profile creation - no phone number needed
reliable push notifications
guaranteed end to end encryption
faster message delivery
still compatible with the large email network, but you need valid DKIM and encryption
So chat mail would be an option if you can get your family members to scan your invite code or click your invite link. Your next family meeting could serve as opportunity for group onboarding. There are no phone numbers or passwords needed, that can be a great argument.
In this case I would start with chatmail. Delta Chat has first class support multiple profiles so you can always add normal email accounts later.
I have written this up as a feature request so it does not get lost. Thank you very much, @2q9lgj6vm, for being so polite and analytical about what must have been a nasty shock.