There have been some discussions about this in other contexts but I would like to explicitly ask here:
Should DC be a replacement for a MUA (mail user agent), so that the user does not need K9 or similar installed on their devices? This does not mean that DC would need all features of K9, just the ones that are used frequently, e.g. to browse the different folders of an account the user could still log in with a mobile browser.
Does WhatsApp needs a complementary and completely different app to catch half of messages that are not shown on it??? no… that is one of the reasons WhatsApp is ‘successful’
You have to understand that using another app because Delta Chat isn’t good in its own, it is absolutely not:
because doing a simpler app doesn’t make it simple for the user in the end.
delta chat is an email client, it shows emails in a different way but it must compete with other email clients and be able to do what they do, even if it do it in a different way, to me using delta chat and k-9, is the same as saying “use Thunderbird and Sylpheed at the same time because any of them is good enough for reading emails”
There already are federated chat protocols (XMPP and Matrix), for me the advantage of DC over them is e-mail compatibility and therefore it needs MUA features
The subject issue would be 1 settings points in the chat settings,
showing mailing lists would not make anything more complicated (maybe one could swipe left on a mail to hide all mails from this sender but that’s another issue)
and making contact requests more visible may indeed make things more “disturbing” but this is also handy if you use DC just for chatting.
So, the UI wouldn’t need to be a lot more complicated IMHO.
“email in new dresses”
you are showing them in bubbles and grouping them by the sender, still an email client that uses IMAP and SMTP, and actually currently delta chat can show you a message as email if you long-press it and tap info it is just not as comfortable as we want it to be.
It has the look of a chatting app, but Delta Chat is an email client
actually not being able to ‘check the inbox the usual way’, is a downside people tell me about delta chat, some user told me that Delta Chat looks good but that he needs to use an email client anyway, wouldn’t it be really comfortable to do all your email activities from your new favourite email client: Delta Chat?? wouldn’t felt a waste to have two apps to send emails and fighting for your inbox?? because using Delta Chat at the same time that others email clients isn’t working pretty well anyway!
Sadly because of this missing feature, some users keep using a competitor app: SIJU (an email chatting app like Delta Chat) this are some screenshot of what that app do:
There is old, verified by time wisdom - do one thing, but do it best.
Gist of DC is to be secure, private chat that doesn’t use 3rd party signaling services.
Mixing it with regular non encrypted emails is a way to easy lost track which emails encrypted and which are not.
K9 can easily work with email account that hold for example 300+ Gb emails, DC - can’t due to its internals.
exactly what we want, currently we are not doing this ‘one thing’ well and need another email client to do it, it is like a ‘cat’ command that some times it works and for some input I need to manually use an ‘echo’ command to do the work…
seriously I think you didn’t get it, no one talked about unencrypted emails until you mentioned it now, we are talking about UI, why having a classic email view mode would means the emails are unencrypted??? currently email are unencrypted in the chat view if one of the peers do not support it, this have nothing to do with with the way you display messages!!!
There should be no “email mode” config setting (required for A simple UI with no "bullshit"! Email compatibility, which is a must, rather sooner than later, makes such a config option obsolete.
The DC text editor interface may, for example, just show the text that will go into the subject of a composed classic email message with a soft shaded background, ending with the shaded standard subject separator “-” in grey. A simple manual carriage return (linefeed) could then serve to manually end the subject and start the body.
(Subject and Group names · Issue #128 · deltachat/deltachat-core · GitHub)
And assuming the defaults from the minimal-set of 1 preset selection (+4 hidden options) at: Use-cases, chat rules and configuration options, everything (chat and email) can work out-of-the-box, non-obtrusive, easily discoverable by the user, and interacting seamlessly.
You asked to specify why for negatives. It’s pretty simple.
DC is a neat chat, and I want it to develop further and to be a great chat, which I can continue to recommend to my contacts.
And I really afraid that spending limited resources to 1) creating MUA functions, 2) experimenting with trying to make thing that is equally good for chatting and mailing will lead us to a thing that isn’t a good chat, nor a good MUA. And it’s a huge risk of fail.
I think Delta Chat can perfectly be a substitute for a MUA, without losing its simplicity and without implementing a classic email view,
-We must look for the reasons that would lead us to use a MUA.
-Basic characteristics of the MUA, which does not have an alternative form in Delta Chat and try to implement it, not to be the same, but to be an alternative way to solve the same problem.
For example:
I currently use an email client to be able to send messages to many people with hidden copies, currently DC has no alternative option for this. But proposals have been made that, when implemented, may be an alternative. I refer to the types of groups proposed by @adbenitez . And eventually I won’t have to use a MUA to do this.
What I see in DelatChat is a chat application that happens to use emails as its backbone.
I think chatting and writing emails are two very distinct forms of communication. Emails and its tropes (“Dear Sir”, “kind regards”, . . . ) are as alien to chats as short informal bursts of messages are to emails.
I don’t see a point trying to merge the two worlds. But that might just be me
Makes one wonder whether they simply AREN’T so distinct for others. But I can’t wrap my head around that
Anyway. Time for a little anecdote.
I remember about 10 years ago my flat mate had an iPhone and I still had an old Nokia were you could only view one message at a time. I ended every SMS with “cu Axel” and sometimes wrote things like “concerning the SMS 2 days ago were you asked…”.
He basically told me to stop it because for him that made no sense in a UI that showed him all our messages as a thread.
I think the impedance mismatch between mails and chats is even greater.
Of course for journalists or activists (were privacy and reliability take strong precedent over a little awkwardness here and there) better MUA functionality might make more sense.
