In some regions of Russia, mobile internet is completely blocked, with the exception of services included on a “whitelist.” Whitelists include government-owned email providers, such as Mail.ru. I assumed that connecting Delta Chat to my Mail.ru email would work even under the block. However, when I found myself in an area where mobile internet was blocked, I discovered that the Mail.ru app continued to work, but no other alternative clients worked.
Why do you think this is happening, and is there an alternative way to connect to email using Delta Chat?
I don’t know if it would be possible to disguise DC as a Mail.ru app. As a kludge, there is a webXDC app that encrypts and decrypts texts, you could copy-paste. That’s pretty ugly tho.
Pirate mobile internet is another option. By making antennae in strange shapes and large sizes, finding the source of an intermittent radio signal can be made quite slow and difficult.
probably the app is using some web/webmail interface that is not blocked while all the other 3rd parties try to use SMTP/IMAP directly and that servers are blocked, that are not the same as the web interface server
in that case you are better off using something like:
Would you be willing to draft a new guide text, @eidolog and @Alex?
Seems the Russian government is taking a page out of the playbook the US uses for Signal. Phone numbers are generally quite identifiable and are often used to index surveillance data. If used with the upcoming multitransport, I think the public key in the Autocrypt header could identify the same user profile on other transports, even if it was possible to set Mail.ru as a transport channel of last resort (as Alex suggests).
The user could of course use a separate profile, but the default could leak data.
at the last moment of Internet blocking in Russia based on white lists, no bypass works…
delta chat can’t cope because the blocking algorithm is quite clumsy - only what’s on the white list is available
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that you should just use email encryption
And no matter mail or Yandex, the message will be encrypted, the rest is not important.
There are also VDS providers that allow you to use messengers such as ejabberd and Martrix even in very difficult(blocked situations), although this may end at any time, but for now it is.
Also here the creator of Invizible says that it breaks through all the locks(I didn’t try it)
So has it been confirmed that Delta Chat works with the whitelisted providers under the “whitelist” situation?
The original post seems to say that it doesn’t.
Does Mozilla Thunderbird also not work?
Sorry, that bit was in Russian. If you set up Mail.ru (similar to the way you set up Gmail) then it works, but just putting in the IMAP settings does not work. This hassle barrier and knowlege barrier is probably effective in preventing most people from using third-party clients.
Honestly I don’t think the Tor or mesh-networking options given are any easier to use.
Last I checked the Tor setting required you fill in a text field to give the proxy. A popup that said “Connection seems to be blocked, use Tor?” and a use-Tor tickbox in the settings seem more likely to work.
A “Use mesh network” button that led to an OS-specific wizard that would guide you through installing one would be work, but maybe effective. Or a help page, even.
there is one problem with mail.ru and it is quite serious, you can now register on this mail server only through VK ID, otherwise there is no other way, regarding the work of the Cherkz delta chat, yes, it will be possible, but again, it all depends on the presence of a mailbox on the same service
for delta chat to work when the Internet is blocked by white lists, there is a working solution and it has been tested more than once, there is enough bandwidth to both send a message and send a video or picture, calls do not work but this does not matter, moreover, delta chat supports this bypass initially