DeltaBot: an email bot assistant

Feature Proposal
1

User Story:
I just installed and configured Delta Chat, in the main screen I see my chats list,
there are a chat already there, with someone called “DeltaBot” with a funny contact picture
of a robot with a delta sign, the bot have sent me a welcome message giving me some hints about DC,
and a brief summary of the things he can do for me and how to get more help, I will call this friendly bot DB.

DB is really kind, he even offered himself to send an invitation message to a friend to join to chat in DC with me if I give
him the email address of the friend.

I asked to DB what is new in this version of DC and he replied with a list of changes, new features, etc.
Also I asked him to notify me when a new release of DC comes out.

I have added some contacts and started to chat with some friends, Amy have asked me to meet in our
usual place, I will ask to DB about the weather, so I will take an umbrella if needed.

I’m not a businessman but I guess it is useful that DB is able to give currency rates (including popular crypto-currencies)

I’m chatting with my Chinese friend Lee, I don’t speak Chinese but we communicate using English,
sometimes there are sentences I don’t know how to say in English, luckily my good friend DB
can help me with this, I just ask him to translate sentences for me this way: “translate ES EN amigo, realmente estoy amando DeltaChat”.

From time to time I like to get info about things, I can ask to DB: “what is ?” and he knows most the time, I guess he is
using Wikipedia or Wiktionary (localized, ex. es.wikipedia.org).

I like to read news, every morning I ask DB to give me some news.

My friends seems to be busy, luckily DB is always there for me, I ask him to
entertain me and he quickly offered to make me a joke, to give me the picture of the day(probably from Wikipedia and/or NASA),
to talk me about a random topic (probably a Wikipedia article), to give me the quote of the day (probably from Wikiquote), to tell me my horoscope,
and many other interesting options like playing min-games like “hangman” with me.

I have been trying Delta Chat for a couple of weeks and I am really surprised by all the useful things I can do while chatting with my friends, with
a secure (encrypted) email communication, I feel more in control of my life and my data now, accessing most of DB equivalent
services on a web browser would probably involved ads, and tracking of my activities.

10 Likes
2

read this like a brainstorm, with a touch of humour.

2 Likes
3

I love it :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

me too :heart:

1 Like
5

I’m not sure if this is a really important thing.

But still a funny idea :+1:

1 Like
6

webratte Well, for people with limited or restricted Internet access this is really useful. (Ex. in Cuba people can pay for email-only service, and Internet access is really expensive for us (more than 35% of salary for 600MB))

2 Likes
7

Once this project provided a web-over-email gateway: http://tek.sourceforge.net
The software may still be installable.

8

thanks testbird, I am aware of http://tek.sourceforge.net
but as far as I know this needs two parts, a client side app and a server side (with internet) and the TEK server that used to be hosted at some university I don’t remember the name now, is no longer available. Anyway browsing by email inside of Delta Chat isn’t what I am proposing here, so please lets avoid getting off-topic :slight_smile:

9

Every email response system will need a server side part. But if you really think this is off-topic you likely won’t be capable currently to tinker with this anyway, for example to open responses with html attachments in an installed web browser.

10

testbird of curse it have to have two parts that is why I mentioned it because as you say it:

gave me the impression that you was like suggesting I could just download it and start using it without a server outside the country with Internet access

11

I’m NOT proposing a way to browse by email, my point with a bot is make things easy and fast, same reason that people in freenode channels use bots for translating text, showing an excerpt of a URL, etc people like this even when they are on a browser and could do this by hand(ex. by using a website directly)

12

testbird or do you are suggesting to use the TEK code as an starting point for the bot???

13

Bingo.

At least it seems still available, but there were also others that may even be better suited for a direct text interface, maybe you are able to find somebody that still has the code.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140426172044/http://www4mail.org:80/

It could be wired up using GitHub - deltachat-bot/deltabot: Delta.Chat bot written in Python

I feel more in control of my life and my data now, accessing most of DB equivalent
services on a web browser would probably involved ads, and tracking of my activities.

Ads and a good part of the scripts may be filtered (privoxy.org?) but even if you’re hosting your own bot, every online request is likely to get logged.

14

wait a minute… are you telling me that my son “deltabot”, born from my “original” imagination already exist??? dude it is hard to me to believe that there are other people with that “good taste” for robot names >:-/
hahaha this is awesome!

15

the point is having a public bot that several users do encrypted requests to, so even if someone are logging the bot request, they can’t track them back to the user, anyway since I’m NOT proposing browsing by email, there are no ads, because deltabot will only scrap the needed information from the pages, pages are not unknown for the bot, ex. Wikipedia, and have a known format, the bot will not retrieve random pages requested by the user, it will only provide some services with data taken from some useful pages, again this is NOT browsing by email.