DeltaChat doesn't group messages as before (regression)

That’s a reason why the wiki lists the general feature of “belongs to another chat”.

But this reason can be avoided with support for different subjects within the same chat (necessary for mailinglists anyway).

I don’t think asking for already known contacts and goups makes sense. It’d guess it’s one of the not-considered side effects of the ad-hoc change towards the not well fitting “show emails” option, instead of aiming towards a widely usable default, plus coherent use-case options.

So if it’s a regression, is there an issue for that or should we make one?

I hope the devs started to understand the problem. Short term, without mailing list support, differing subjects received from existing chats’ participants could maybe open in separate new chats, without prompting.

Unfortunately the past has shown that public input and reasoning was not valued that much yet. Issues get tagged as discussions, closed and deferred to the forums. Then suddenly half-baked “features” like the “show emails” simplifications came, making the overall situation worse for more use-cases than it helped.

We’ll see.

the “show emails” feature is quite useful and now classic emails pops as DC contact requests when you set email interaction to “all” that is much better than the past IMHO :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sounds like you were only thinking for yourself, and that feature is still not what you truly wanted.

When thinking about it, one sees it is neither possible any more to just browse all classic emails without always having to tap through an unknown number of annoying silent prompts, nor possible to get truly notified about all classic emails. (Nor seeing the number of waiting new emails somewhere.)

One could very probably say there is hardly ever something that would count as a “contact request” to be found when actually browsing “classic emails” → And what happend? https://github.com/deltachat/interface/issues/5

So what gets listed are more likely “classic emails”, plus messages that deltachat did not catch properly.

Beyond fixing the chat/email-message matching, the two possible and basic dimensions that need to be configurable independently in some way to cover the use-cases simply seem

  1. Selecting a [reachability/listen-to/contacted-by] setting (More useful "reachable by" chat interaction setting) and
  2. Selecting a presentation level (email-notifications/email-counter/separate email-list).
    (A simple “show counter” option will do, as we once discussed, because “1) everybody” implies notifications and obsoletes the list.)

With this, silent “open chat?” prompts can be avoided almost completely, they are only needed to determine unsure chat/email-matching cases.

The wiki page already references all this, and questions could have been asked and discussed as well.

So if it’s a regression, is there an issue for that or should we make one?

Have a look, may depend on whether you think it would be important for some unknown closed shop troops.

What are “shop troops”? Was that a typing error? I don’t understand what the linked issue, which is about deleting mails after some days, has to do with my problem.

“Closed shop” is a business term.

Another line is:
Free Software, Open Source and Open Technology.

Outside contributions and public user feedback to specific and concise refinement topics are certainly not answered on topic nor welcomed. Even if considering them could help to avoid the next miss-by-half “feature”, so this might as well be a leadership problem or a goal behind a Fund.

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/issues/1277#issuecomment-599793655

Hard to tell for me as I don’t follow DeltaChat closely. I do recognize you voicing your frustration about developer feedback though.

Anyway this bug still exists and I do think it’s a bug. If anyone’s interested I’ll be glad to explain. Otherwise I’ll assume the devs are just too busy with other things.

Otherwise I’ll assume the devs are just too busy with other things.

exactly that. there are tons of things requested and to do - we have no shortage of ideas :slight_smile:

So before I had a “group”/conversation with 2 people/addresses and whenever someone sent an email, it showed up as a new message in the correct conversation/group

back on-topic, i try to summarize a bit:

  • first of all, this only affects messages sent from non-delta-clients that are no replies to existing groups, so message having no reference to an existing group at all (otherwise this group would be used)

  • by default, these messages are ignored at all

  • only when “show all emails” is enabled, these top-level messages without references show up, if the mail is from a contact that is not accepted yet, as a contact request first. the messages are shown in the most recent chat with the same memberlist then

this is what should happen, if however, of course, might be that there are some bugs. @Lexi would be great if you can re-check this according to the described things and see if things are working as expected - or not :slight_smile:

i think, there is a bug, i also received a mail from a normal MUA that was sent to three person but shows up in the one-to-one-chat, i’ve filed an issue at https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/issues/1349

Hi, and thanks for your reply!

So this has probably been changed, so that mails that are not replies (and have more than one recipients?) show up as a new conversation, right? I think that change makes sense.

I think I just want an additional setting to configure what happens, when I get a mail “request” / a new mail that is not a reply (and has more than one recipient). “Email interaction: show classing emails (for acceptec contacts)” could be clearer, for example “Show as requests: none / for accepted contacts / all
Show as new thread/conversation: for accepted contacts / all”

If I understand you correctly it’s not a bug but working as intended. It’s just impossible right now to always show mails if they are sent by a contact: If the message goes to multiple recipients and is not a reply to an existing conversation it will either show up as a request or not at all. Correct?

That’s a different scenario than mine. (Congratulations for finding that bug however :wink: )

yes.

it will show as request if “show classing emails” is set to “all” - otherwise it won’t show up.

in the first usecase (“all”), you typically do no use another mail program and want to handle all mails with Delta Chat, in the second usecase (“chats only”, “replies”), you typically use another mail program in addition to Delta Chat.

Hmm, so in the first and second usecases, wouldn’t some people like a notification for messages by contacts they have already accepted? It might be annoying or too much if it’s a conversation you don’t want to be notified about/use as a chat, but on the other hand if it is an important one or your contact wrote a new mail instead of a reply for no good reason, wouldn’t it be better to be notified? I think at least a setting for that would be good. If you think I am the only one who wants this (which might well be true) I can create a topic with a poll on the forum.

isn’t that the case already?

you get system-notifications for all messages that show up in accepted chats.

I was talking about the “new conversations”-mails from a non-DC client that are not a reply to a message before and have more than one recipient. So no, these do not notify the user. Question is, am I the only one who wants that.

if you enable “Show classic mails” to “All” (or to “Accepted contacts”), “new conversations”-mails from a non-DC client should result in a notification.

if they have more than one recipient, however, in fact, this group does not always pop up - maybe the bug mentioned above is related, though.

however, i suggest to wait for the next release (coming soon™) and try over then. this bug, and some other possibly related are fixed then.

So if it does pop up it should also always give me a notification? Because I’ve never gotten a notification about a request. Yes, I do have “Show classic mails” set to “All”.

I’ve not had any problems with the request not showing up at all though, I think.

OK cool, thanks for keeping working on this! :slight_smile: I’ll report back ASAP

you will get notifications.

however, this “notification wording” is not sufficient :slight_smile:

there are at least two type of notifications that Delta Chat uses:

  1. in-app-notifications atop of the chatlist, visible when the app is in use
  2. system-notifications that show up when the app is not active

both types will have an colored unread-counter in the chatlist.

for unknown, unaccepted contacts, only 1. is used. this is by design currently, mainly because of spam that otherwise will make the phone ring/vibrate/ring, esp. with the show_emails=all setting.