Don't remove the option “Move automatically to DeltaChat Folder"!

1

Hello Delta Chat team,

I recently received a system message in DeltaChat stating that the “Move automatically to DeltaChat Folder” option will no longer be supported in the future.

I’ve been using Delta Chat for a really long time. And the ability to store my Delta Chat messages in my normal Email account was one of the most important reasons why I chose Delta Chat as my messenger.

Firstly, this gives me the freedom to choose my preferred Email provider. Secondly, I have access to the messages themselves via my normal Email account. They are not hidden on a server that I have no way of accessing.

Of course, I could set up my own relay server to retain control over the messages. But how much more complicated is that compared to the current solution?

I am a software developer myself and can understand your argument regarding the complexity and maintainability of the code.

But there is another perspective: that of the user. And for anyone who wants to retain control over their messages, the current solution is the simplest. The “Move automatically to DeltaChat Folder” option ensures that Delta Chat messages do not interfere with normal Emails and not annoying in the inbox, as they are stored in this separate folder. They would be annoying if the option will be removed.

Deleting the option would be very bad for me. As a consequence, I would no longer be able to use Delta Chat, and there would be no other messenger that would be suitable for me.

I hope you can understand my reasons for why this option is important to me, and I would appreciate your feedback.

9 Likes
2

You can use your preferred email provider. You can create new profiles with manually entered credentials (“Use Classic Email as Relay” option) and it is possible to add a second relay this way as well by using dclogin:// URL. There is no built-in UI for adding non-chatmail second relay and the message does not mention it, but it is possible. There may be UI for this later, although it will likely cause problems like users logging in to the same mailbox with multiple profiles.

These same messages are in the Delta Chat in SQLite database. What do you do with the messages on the server? Do you have a particular usecase for archiving encrypted messages like this? I am not aware of an email client that can handle such amount of small messages and modern OpenPGP.

What does “retaining control over the messages” mean? Practically the easiest way to access the messages is using Delta Chat itself, you can backup SQLite database and build tools that use it.

Maybe focus on one particular usecase that is broken by using a separate IMAP inbox with its own address instead of a subfolder of the inbox used by another email client.

1 Like
3

What about the other option: “Only Fetch from DeltaChat Folder”. Will it be removed too?

UPD: Seems like it’s also going away:

2 Likes
4

Please keep the separate deltachat folder on IMAP.

Using a relay is not a good option - while the data might be encrypted, the relay does see the communication patterns and metadata (who talks to whom at which times, how often, message sizes etc.), which is quite a lot of information that would be given to a third party – needlessly.

Removing that feature impacts all people using a email address for both email and δchat – please don’t drop it!!

5 Likes
5

I am also very unhappy with the planned feature removal. I’ll explain why the “recommended” way to switch to ChatMail is no solution for me:

(1) With ChatMail I need to trust relatively small relay providers. While mail may be totally encrypted, I fear they may go down (overload, lost support etc). This will not happen to large email providers.

(2) With ChatMail I may loose messages without knowing of. E.g, when I do not retrieve messags for 20 (?) days on vacation or similar, depending on the relay.

(3) With ChatMail the sender does not receive a message when (2) happens. For rare conversation this might be a real pitty.

(4) With ChatMail it is not possible to keep old messges forever. The downloaded messages do not stay on the server. And I might loose my mobile device. Even when I do backups there will be a gap. Or: There might be no space on the device left. A second device is no solution as I need to switch it on before messages are removed on the relay. (With classic mail I can move the IMAP data to a local IMAP server/store at any time.)

(5) With ChatMail I cannot send mail to standard email users AFAIK. What a huge pitty.

(6) Incremental backups on a device that always have to free space from time to time cannot really be ever “merged” together for later use somewhere else AFAIK.

So… I try to stick to classic DeltaChat usage.

However, by disabling the mentioned feature I get a huge problem: I do have my conversation indeed mixed with my standard mail INBOX. I cannot stop moving mail into a DeltaChat subdirectory. If this feature is gone, I need a new mail account just for DeltaChat. But in turn, this is compilcated too: I need to contact all users, I need to somehow deal with may huge DC mail history in the previous INBOX/DeltaChat folder etc…

And of course, I need to explain all non-technical friends using DC just because I recommended that once, how to migrate now.

I hope that explains why this is an issue to users like me.

Thanks

4 Likes
6

(2) It is not true that a chatmail relay stores your message for up to 20 days. Messages beyond 200k will be deleted within 7 days by default.

(5) Reception of unencrypted messages are also disallowed by default.

7

(1) You don’t have to trust any operators at all. Registration is anonymous and emails are encrypted. If an operator discontinues their service, you can use another relay. Five relays are possible simultaneously per profile.

It’s best to simply forget that DC uses email. This doesn’t have to remain the case. Since the identity is no longer the address, DC has essentially become protocol-independent—a kind of meta-messenger, so to speak.

That’s why I’m now in favor of abandoning email compatibility altogether. Otherwise, it just creates confusion. DC V2 is actually a new messenger.

8

This is addressed by the ability to switch relays and using multiple relays. You can switch relay even after it goes down.

While we suggest users add a chatmail relay, it is possible to add non-chatmail relay if you really want to and the ability to use non-chatmail is not going away. So all the discussion about various disadvantages of chatmail is a bit offtopic, if you have want to use non-chatmail server you can.

9

do you realize it is the same and worse if you use a classic email account right? the chatmail address at least is anonymous, the classic email address is even more tied to your identity and the unencrypted email you receive there helped them even further to identify you

anyways, there is a huge misconception here, you want to use classic email server instead of chatmail??? use it :tada: we are not removing support for that! the options being removed only concern SHARED USAGE of a single mailbox by both Delta Chat and a classic email client, which has been for a long time discouraged, and it is buggy/problematic experience with double notifications sometimes, etc. for technical reasons we can’t keep supporting that use case for A VERY FEW users, most people or use chatmail or use a dedicated classic email account for chatting in DC, that is the cleanest trouble-free solution, having a single inbox and wanting to do chatting and email at the same time with it is what is getting a bit worse and was never great experience

I am using DC with classic email accounts and using it to send/read unencrypted email and encrypted chats at the same time without any problems with the options that are going to be removed already disabled, READ CAREFULLY the announcement before spreading FUD and confusion, please

1 Like
10

Before I creating this topic, I send a Email to the Delta Chat team. Today I get a answer.

The only way to use a classic Email provider for Delta Chat is to create a separate Email account and use this account as relay in Delta Chat.

The simplicity of being able to use your existing email account was a great argument for convincing others to use Delta Chat. It was a great experience!!!

Now, telling them that they have to create a separate account will, in my opinion, reduce acceptance to almost zero.

I don’t really understand why only the technical point of view shoul be the right one.

And the solution with chatmail relays will not be convincing either. Because they are the responsibility of someone else and not the responsibility of my trusted email provider.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind creating and using a separate account for Delta Chat. But I don’t want to impose that on the people I communicate with via Delta Chat.

It’s a great pity that you made your decision without involving the users in the decision-making process.

4 Likes
11

once again, you can use your existing email account, just that you must then only use DC to check the email in that account, for your best experience

about the “was a great argument” some stats for you:

when we did that DC had very few users for years, people struggled to onboard because complexity of configuring a classic email account (ex. enabling extra settings in gmail, generate app passwords etc) and then even after configuring it was not really usable, the classic email providers have strong limits like 500 emails per day in gmail (counted by recipient not per actual email sent) or 1000 emails per day in Posteo etc. that plus getting weird encrypted email in the inbox and notifications for them when the app was not running etc. so eventually they just couldn’t use it

when we introduced chatmail, the user base increased by more than 10 times!

the “use your own email account” is not a “great argument” but a weakness in practice, most people that try that have a bad experience for chatting, for the mentioned problems, including lack of push notifications

if this usage is not your coup of tea, it is ok if you then don’t use Delta Chat, just use a classic email client if it is what you want, delta chat is an encrypted messenger, if that is not what you want, you are in the wrong place

because the practical reality is what matters not the theory of “how great” the app is because you can use the same email account for chatting and email at the same time, and once again this specifically about using the same email account with two apps: delta chat and another email client, if you just use Delta Chat for that email account, it is totally fine

do you really believe your use case is what most Delta Chat users do??? +90% of DC users use chatmail, they don’t even use a classic email account, only a very few advanced users manage to get that working at all

there is no way back, and there is no point on trying to convince us stubbornly, we are not removing this for fun but because we need to because it makes development of features like multi-relay harder, so it is “use as is” if it doesn’t fit your needs then don’t use it

hopefully you give a try to the suggested approaches and stick around, if not, good luck in your endeavors

2 Likes
12

anyways before we start going in circles or diverging, this is the answer to your post:

2 Likes
13

Ok. Thanks for the clarification (so it is “use as is” if it doesn’t fit your needs then don’t use it). Than don’t use it.

3 Likes
16

A few days ago someone told me about this new change and I opened the forum to see if anyone was talking about it and I found this topic.
I started using deltachat because there was support for classic emails, seemed like a brilliant idea because:

  • great reason to have a support of thousands of servers

  • the technology behind mail servers is standard, light and very reliable

  • to be able to inspect what was actually communicated to the server (which is impossible in the other messengers)

  • the possibility of communicating with those who did not intend to use deltachat and then suggest to try it because they could continue to use their email address

  • In addition, in my specific case it helped me to carry out degoogling because I have always found too boring to consult a traditional mail client while keeping the chat always open is more reasonable due to the greater traffic and therefore a good reason not to lose emails. I used this as a pretext to keep together many addresses for different purposes to replace gmail with pleasure.

Do not get me wrong, I believe that chatmails are a great idea, I am hosting myself a relay and I am absolutely excited about the improvement you have achieved in all respects (performance and additional features), but I don’t understand why the use I make of deltachat with classic emails should be worsened.
What problem created a separate directory for deltachat messages?
I have configured on my client about 10 classic emails and 10 chatmail accounts, now if I update the client, the dc messages will mix with emails? what would the improvement be?
Maybe it’s my point of view only as a user and not a developer that doesn’t allow me to see how my experience will improve, I currently only see that my mailboxes will be messed up without a valid reason.

Obviously I understand that it is impossible to influence your decision because you have already introduced the change before you even try to see how this change would have been accepted, but I would like to know this:
“What is the benefit of having all the emails mixed up?”

2 Likes
17

To make it clear, nobody talks about removing support for non-chatmail servers, they are supported. What we want to get away from is sharing mailboxes (identified by the email address) between Delta Chat and email clients that don’t understand chat messages.

  1. Reordering problems. There is no order between messages in different folders, messages only have order within one folder, so you need to move messages from INBOX to DeltaChat before processing them and only read messages from DeltaChat folder. Otherwise your devices may process messages in the wrong order as one of them is reading from INBOX while the other has already read the message from INBOX and moved it to DeltaChat. To move messages to DeltaChat folder before downloading you need to know if it is a chat message and the only way to know it is to have a Chat-Version header unencrypted. We want to encrypt the Chat-Version header as a part of the effort to reduce metadata. There are also issues with some providers that don’t support MOVE command or support it but don’t advertise it in which case you need to resort to copying and deleting fallback and this causes reordering when you have multiple devices.

  2. Watching multiple folders requires maintaining multiple connections to IMAP server.
    (There is an IMAP NOTIFY extension, but it is not always supported so we cannot depend on it. Adding more dependencies like this is a problem for developing new servers, e.g. we recently removed the need to have CONDSTORE extension.) Some providers limit the number of connections per profile so it is possible to end up in a state where connection to INBOX works but connection to DeltaChat folder does not and vice versa. This status needs to be displayed in connectivity view where we now display multiple relays as well.

  3. Notifications. If Delta Chat is used to move messages from INBOX to DeltaChat folder, you will often get a notification when the message arrives into INBOX and before Delta Chat moves it to DeltaChat folder.

  4. Requirement to keep Delta Chat running. Since it is the client that keeps chat messages separated from non-chat messages, if you remove a profile from Delta Chat or uninstall Delta Chat or simply have it on a device that is currently offline, you will still keep getting chat messages into the same inbox from contacts that don’t know you don’t use Delta Chat with this address, and the messages cannot be separated anymore. You may be traveling with Delta Chat installed only on your desktop, you open webmail client and it is full of encrypted chat messages from some group you are in.

  5. Latency. Each message first comes into INBOX, then INBOX loop gets notified, stops IDLE, lists messages in the folder and moves the message to DeltaChat, then DeltaChat gets notified, stops IDLE, checks messages in the folder and fetches the messages. Same for push notifications, on iOS if DeltaChat folder is used, when push notification arrives you need to first check INBOX, then only once INBOX is fetched and all messages are moved fetch DeltaChat to see what UIDs got assigned to them and fetch them.

Support for non-chatmail servers and plaintext email is not removed and there are no plans to remove it. You can use Delta Chat to receive notifications about plaintext emails and reply to them, nothing changes about it. But for encrypted chatting we want to avoid users setting up new profiles with the same mailbox they already use because this results in all the problems listed above and was never a nice experience.

For new users: if you have your own server and want to use it, it can be done, just create a new mailbox for chatting and create a new profile with this mailbox without reusing existing one. If you want to use Delta Chat to also read messages from existing inbox, just setup another profile and receive messages there, but use dedicated profile for chatting.

Unless you use 10 classic email profiles for chatting as 10 different profiles in Delta Chat, disabling moving to Delta Chat folder should not be a problem for most of them.

3 Likes
18

Well, if it was so easy to continue using classic email in DC as some state above - please, treat such users as first class citizens as all other users!

I did read the notification message that was notifying about the feature change, then followed the given link https://delta.chat/legacy-move. Tadaa: I can’t see a description how to continue properly with classic email. Instead a recommendation to switch to ChatMail.

So, please provide details how to move an existing “mixed” account to a new one without forcing to use ChatMail.

Please do not talk about “few” users without even giving numbers - that can be ignored.

And, if time, please also address carefully the issues listed with ChatMail. Note, it’s not about encryption here (which is a good thing).

Thanks everybody

3 Likes
19

I have modified first post in How to migrate your profile to another relay (version 2.33) to reference how to do this with dclogin://.

20

Thanks for the reply, let’s see if I understand correctly:

  1. -the problem with the order of emails seems a bit complex for me so I don’t think I can say anything about, the only thing I could say would be, can’t you trigger a date update after the moving?
    -I understand that not being able to move messages before downloading would still make the email messy until you downloaded the message, but in the end the difference would be between not having a final part not moved to having it all not moved.
    -but of course I can’t say anything against emails that don’t support the move command, in that case there would be an exception to manage.
  2. ok this seems to me an insurmountable problem since I think it is necessary to look at both the folder “inbox” and “deltachat” if you have more than one device configured
  3. Not a big problem but I can understand that someone might be bothering
  4. I guess this is why you recommend exclusive use as a normal emails or for dc messages. Even if I think it is not an unsolvable and in any case the alternative would be to have this problem always and not only in certain eventualities.

However, at this point the only solution seems to me to delete messages on the server if one wants to continue to make a promiscuous use. Will that option remain available in the settings?
In the conventional email clients that I have configured, I rarely exchange encrypted messages with DC, but I don’t want to lose the promiscuous use because I still find it useful from time to time, so at this point I would activate the deletion of messages on the server to avoid too much mess.

21

We already sort batches by INTERNALDATE in addition to fetching in the order of UID because e.g. Gmail does not preserve the order of a batch of moved messages when you move them to DeltaChat folder. The whole batch is moved atomically, but then the messages in the batch are ordered in arbitrary order. If messages are not moved like this, we can just fetch them in the order of UID. It actually looks like in bad cases like failing in the middle of the batch on such providers may result in lost messages, will need to look into it.

Historically this went like this:

  1. Initially Delta Chat had no encryption at all and sorted messages into DeltaChat folder by just looking at headers, including unencrypted addresses of recipients to decide if the message is a reply to the chat message.
  2. Then Autocrypt was added as opportunistic security. With headers such as In-Reply-To and References still not encrypted replies to chats were sorted by just looking at headers. Users who uninstalled Delta Chat received messages that they cannot decrypt, but with all the recipients in the clear, so they can just reply “hey, i cannot read this message” from webmail. This turned the whole chat unencrypted for everyone, around 2019 basically every somewhat large chat turned unencrypted frequently. This was later sort of patched by having members “vote” on whether the group should be encrypted with “encryption preference” setting, but still any reply from non-Autocrypt client turned the whole chat unencrypted.
  3. In 2023 “verified” groups were introduced, later renamed this was renamed into “guaranteed encryption”. The problem with such groups is that they cannot be unencrypted, so if someone joined such group then uninstalled Delta Chat, they will later write back and ask to get removed from the group with the message landing in 1:1 chat and the receiver has to figure out which group it was about. 1:1 chats were still using opportunistic encryption, meaning they can become unencrypted at any time, but this allowed to use them as a fallback in case of encryption problems. With every user identified by email address it was kind of possible by going to the profile of the user, checking shared groups and removing from all of them. Still, you need to ask someone else to remove you from “green checkmarked” chats.
  4. With Delta Chat 2.0 released in 2025 encrypted chats are encrypted forever, there are no chats with opportunistic encryption that may get unencrypted at all. If you want to write to someone with encryption and without encryption, there are two 1:1 chats, one unencrypted chat with email address, the other is encrypted with the key. This makes contacting the sender from webmail if you lost the key even more difficult as you will appear as the new address-contact, not as a normal key-contact.

Previously the problem was “solved” by having unreliable encryption that silently dropped to unencrypted state with a small padlock icon disappearing. Now this is not an option, but at the same time because of persistent encryption the email addresses don’t matter for encrypted chats. There is no point of using “well-known” and nicely looking email address when you are identified by your key, so we recommend users to use a dedicated address when they set up a new profile, this is also what essentially happens with chatmail which is just an email server that allows to easily create a new address. We also turned off “move to DeltaChat” folder by default for new profiles because this is what makes sense for new profiles that use dedicated addresses.

The most frequent reason why users don’t want to create a dedicated address nowadays is because they want to use non-chatmail server but don’t actually have control over the server where they can create addresses, e.g. because they pay some email provider already and the email provider has a plan that makes it much more expensive (like twice as expensive) to use two addresses than two folders, even though for the provider itself creating another address costs nothing. Sometimes providers allows to create aliases that deliver messages to the same inbox and then users set up server filter to move messages addressed to alias to the DeltaChat folder automatically, this is how “only watch DeltaChat folder” setting appeared.

Since we recommend that users either create a dedicated address for new profiles if they have control over some server that they use, or use chatmail if they don’t have such server, new profiles are not expected to use any of these settings. This is what makes them “legacy” settings, they now only exist for already set up profiles.

If you mean “Delete Messages from Server” setting, it deletes all messages that are seen in Delta Chat, so if you receive unencrypted messages it will delete them as well, likely not what you want. For profiles that you use to receive unencrypted messages mostly and not chat messages you don’t really need to do anything other than disabling moving of chat messages to DeltaChat folder, if there are almost no chat messages there anyway then there is nothing to move.

1 Like
22

As far as I know only_fetch_mvbox may be replaced as a per-relay option, and I think I saw a dev comment that it’s still undecided if that per relay option will stay or not. (Seems to depend on how well it can be integrated into the code without being a maintenance hassle.)