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.