Hi, I’m new to Delta Chat, and wanted to make sure I’m understanding correctly.
I’m using my own email provider, which allows both inbound aliases (which all deliver to the same inbox) and outbound identities. I can also set up filtering rules.
I’ve set up an alias for personal Delta Chat, let’s call it cr0n.delta@cr0n.me. And I’ve been testing with a couple friends on that one.
However I would like to have another Delta Chat profile to share with random people online, and not have it tied to the same email address. I would like to set up a different alias, perhaps cr0n.anon@provider-default.com.
It seems to me that because my provider directs all inbound mail to the same inbox, and because Delta Chat only uses a folder named DeltaChat, I can’t set up filtering rules in order to have two different aliases/identities on this email provider? Because the incoming messages for two different Delta Chat profiles cannot share the same DeltaChat folder. Is that correct?
I found some prior messages to that effect but I wanted to be sure I’m reading them right, and that the feature hasn’t been added in the meantime.
I understand that using a dedicated Chatmail server might be a better option here, but I already trust (and pay for) my existing email provider, who also (not coincidentally) is located in a jurisdiction which is resistant to demands for data at rest. So, it would be nice if I could set up multiple Delta Chat accounts on that provider. But the fact that all the mail for different aliases is delivered to a single inbox may prevent it.
This setup is not going to work well with current versions of Delta Chat.
If we make it work somehow, it should not depend on server-side filtering rules. Most servers don’t allow to filter the messages or cannot filter by Delivered-To, some may not even add Delivered-To or add it after filtering. We also don’t know about all the servers and cannot guide the user to configure server-side rules correctly. If the setup is going to require server-side rules it is not worth supporting.
As for supporting multiple profiles on the same inbox, currently it is not going to work because encrypted messages for the other profile will still appear in the first profile. The messages will of course fail to decrypt. Also outgoing messages will appear as some sort of groups, both incoming and outgoing unencrypted messages will as groups etc.
We might be able to make it work if we ignore messages for which we are not the recipient, but if we are in Bcc we will not be able to tell if the message is sent to the address associated with the current profile if there is no Delivered-To header added by the server. If we start ignoring messages where our address is not in the To and Delivered-To, such messages will not be delivered to any profile.
Yeah, probably the easiest way to support it while leaving the details up to the user would be to allow multiple differently-named Delta Chat folders like in the one thread, but I can see why that would be a “if it doesn’t work, you’re on your own” option. Those of us who both pay for email and have aliases delivered all to one inbox are probably a pretty small fraction.