Do not use profile name in subject line

[Minim]

I think by “classic -mail” you mean “unencrypted” and not “non-chatmail”?

Personally I am trying to get Chatmail servers talking to as many different classic e-mail clients as possible; I know no reason why non-chat clients should not use Chatmail (and plenty of reasons why they should, including the health of the e-mail ecosystem). So I’d like there to be subjects, because some clients display them nicely.

I’m not as concerned about unencrypted mail, but it’d be nice to have subjects for compatibility, because all our existing social conventions and infrastructure assumes configurable subjects.

For instance, I know people who whitelist mail that has a specific password in the subject, and discard everything else (reportedly a very effective spam filter, even for addresses posted online). Or if you want to use Debian’s mail-based public bug report system, you need to include the right string in the subject so your bug gets reported against the right package etc.. And so on.

Finally, there is currently a slightly hacky way to set the subject line in Deltachat.

[adbenitez]

@Minim

But Adbenitez is fixing that by making subjects configurable in unencrypted chats.

notice that I am proposing that to the rest of the team, if they agree is another story, even then might get added then to ArcaneChat if they don’t agree to add it to Delta Chat, but even then I will not be working on it right now, that is a nice to have but absolutely low priority, as you can always create an email with new subject using the “new email” option

[adbenitez]

@peppa

My concern is not about revealing your old profile name to the other person in the chat but about unwittingly revealing your identity to hostile authorities in case of device seizure or device search.

the subject is encrypted so you are not revealing anything, if you are talking about unencrypted email, well, even all messages are being leaked then, but if you think it helps, then just don’t set a display name, since if you set a name it is sent not only in the subject but as your display name in the From header for nice recognition by the receiver, once again: in encrypted emails your name is not visible to servers in any possible way

update: ah you mention device seizure, well in that case the whole conversation is there, together with mentions to your old name in some system messages, if this is a concern what you really need is to use disappearing messages

[peppa]

@Minim

I think by “classic -mail” you mean “unencrypted” and not “non-chatmail”?

Configurable subjects could potentially make sense for encrypted classic email, couldn’t it, if your using it more like classic email with a non-DC client? But I’m not sure how common this is.

But if we assume people are using chatmail servers with DC just for chatting, then the subject really doesn’t have any purpose, and users never even see the subject.

@adbenitez

ah you mention device seizure, well in that case the whole conversation is there, together with mentions to your old name in some system messages, if this is a concern what you really need is to use disappearing messages

Yes, specifically device seizure of your contacts. Disappearing messages also help and plays a role, but they also have shortcomings, as I mentioned at the start:

@peppa

A related issue is profile names appearing on notices about disappearing message timer changes (which unfortunately stay permanently in the chat by default).

Anyway my point is that someone might change their profile, check the chat history and see that there is no mention of their old profile name, and reasonably but falsely assume that the chat can’t be linked to their identity/old profile name. Therefore the UI gives users a false impression of pseudonymity, which invites bad opsec and can lead to compromised identity.