Hi all, I am following this latest saga with all the encryption problems, Deltachat folder yes or no, incorporating audio/video chat, etc… Actually I do not need any of them. I would only need a neat chat-like interface to handle all my emails. If everyone can read my “messages” (emails), like we got used to all other emails, I do not care really. I never really disclose anything sensitive or important in emails anyway. I just want the convenience of following my “conversations” in a more practical, visually more appealing format. As “everybody uses gmail” (alas, sad, but true), it would be also useful to handle these popular webmails better. So far it is a hit-and-miss. So, is it possible not to go into that encrypted chat direction, and just having a deltachat that is doing the simple thing, being a normal email client but with a chat format visual representation of the same IMAP emails? Just my two cents…
You can use Deltachat with any dedicated e-mail account, including a Gmail account. If you use one of the free Chatmail accounts provided in-app, though, they only work for en-to-end-encrypted mail. So everyone in a conversation needs to have a non-Chatmail account in order for the conversation to be unencrypted.
Back in the nineties, it was easy to run a mailserver and everyone did it. It was also easy to get a free e-mail account on someone else’s server, with the (small) operating cost offset by non-surveillance context ads on the webmail homepage; when you used IMAP to access the mail on your own computer, then you didn’t even get those.
But now we have an ad duopoly (Google and Facebook), and they do intensive surveillance and capture almost all the profit; you can no longer support a small website with context ads. The e-mail system was also not designed to be secure against spam (or surveillance), and it got to be a big problem. The simple thing got way less simple.
Methods introduced to fight spam made running a mailserver harder. Some of these methods were heavily influenced by large e-mail providers, who benefitted when running a mailserver became harder and smaller servers shut down, pushing their former users onto the big platforms. And since many of these large providers also profitted from surveillance, they had an incentive not to develop privacy-protecting measures.
Now a few big, mostly American-run platforms host most e-mail, and they increasingly refuse to federate with small providers. Even your government probably has their e-mail run by Microsoft on Microsoft’s cloud computers. The US’s 2018 CLOUD Act also allows the US government secret access to any data held by US providers, regardless of any contractual commitments made by the US providers. Recently, an International Criminal Court judge lost access to his Microsoft mail account after a ruling he made was condemned by the US president. Even if you do not personally mind if anyone reads your e-mails, the economic and geopolitical consequences of concentrations of power are already hurting you.
So European govenments and other organisations are now frantically working to free themselves from American platforms. They have things like all their internal correspondance and their citizen’s health care records on American computers, and they want it back on their own computers, yesterday. So they are investing heavily in decentralized standards-based surveillance-resistant open-source software like Deltachat.
So if interop with Gmail is largely hit-and-miss, that is partly because of defederation and other measures by Google. Gmail, like any dominant provider, has incentives to worsen interoperability. It is also because Deltachat is pushing the e-mail system in a direction that would be highly disadvantageous to Google; towards more privacy and decentralisation, and very low provider-switching costs.
that’s all very nice and dandy, I totally understand the paranoia behind it, but my solution is simple.
- I do not use email for anything sensitive. If someone wants to read my personal chat with my friends about unimportant nonsense, I let them waste their short, useless lives anyway.
- If something is important, there are many ways to converse secretly (NOT EMAIL), let me not even hint here to the solutions, anyone who is in the know knows them very well. Those are bulletproof.
The point is: how much of our lives is really worth keeping secret? A normal person has about 80% of their lives as unimportant nonsense, and most of our chats are like that. For that 20% mission critical information we should all insist to have it OFFLINE (!!!) as the most important line of defense (thus zero digital trace of it), or if some electronic solution is really needed (99% of the cases no need), then use one of those absolutely secret and secure ways of communication, the ones that even those nosy spies cannot crack. Show them the finger.
For the 80% “read my chat, enjoy I don’t care” communication Delta Chat would be fantastic, because it shows the flow of data in a CHAT FORMAT. That is the main advantage. Anything else thrown at it is, IMHO, a waste of energy and time. Anyway, I am using it with normal mail servers (my own), I don’t care of any secrecy, because the content going through my emails is deliberately uninteresting…
I remember Linux Torvalds saying that the best line of defense against all these privacy monsters is to have an uninteresting life that nobody would care spying upon… 
I totally agree… Cheers
Don’t mean to offend anyone but I still don’t get this obsession of some users trying to use DC as a mailing service. What’s the point?
Just chat DC away.. Using DC on anything else than the DC clients to me it’s an offense to the developers.
And about secrets.. Bernando Provenzano, the latest mafia’s god father, has been on the run for over 60 years just writing PIZZINI, short messages on a piece of paper.
The lost art of keeping a secret (Queens of the Stone Age 
)
I do not understand where this “mailing service” comes from. I think this way: emails sent back and forth between a number of people are not dissimilar to chat messages sent the same way. The difference is the VISUAL REPRESENTATION, in an email client they are Re:Re:Re: nonsense, in any normal chat is it with those bubbles, easier to visualize who said what and when. Delta Chat is (or least WAS in the beginning) doing exactly that: using existing (!!!) IMAP servers to represent email communication in a CHAT format. Fantastic. Nice. Genius. I like it.
What I do not like is a) encrypting the messages, so that I cannot read them anymore on my normal email client, and b) pushing people to use “their own” servers instead of “our own” (the ones I own). I can never be sure that “their servers” will be operational tomorrow, however, I am responsible for my mail servers, so I can be reasonably sure that I can rely on those tomorrow, too. Is it clear this way what I am trying to say?
Crystal clear pal, but systems evolve and so do software behind it. I’ve only discovered DC in December but had a read of what it was back in the days (
) and understand what it is now.
For what I understood relays are now just the “postman" who takes care of receiving and route messages to recipients, disregarding the relay email address assigned at the time of signup.
What counts now are the keys on a user device so even when a relay is down, user identity is guaranteed by keys which can be used in any other relay (decryption) and not by the random email address.
And the current in app switching of relays proves this.
Using an email client to interoperate with DC is like trying to reply by snail mail to an email message.
My 2 pennies worth.
I haven’t been around for quite a while, but here’s my understanding so far:
Delta Chat originally started as a messaging app that used an instant message–style interface on top of email as its backbone.
It seems that over time, it has evolved — it still uses email as the transport protocol, but no longer relies on email services as the main message storage. Instead, Delta Chat now uses its own local storage system (based on SQLite) to store messages.
From what I gather, messages are transmitted via email servers as relays, but with end-to-end encryption to keep communication secure.
The lost feature is that both sender and receiver should use the Delta Chat app.
And DC is becoming one of them. I dislike the decrease in e-mail compatibility, but the devs have limited time and are prioritizing encrypting the e-mail ecosystem, an effort I support.
Some conventional mailers now have threaded views that might be closer to what you are looking for.
If I had to manually read through your e-mails, I am sure you are right. But no life is too uninteresting for a scraperbot.
The threat is not easy-to-understand and anthropomorphic (“a person finds out my secrets“. It is societal and algorithmic (“statistical patterns in the communications of my society are exploited by surveillance markets to enable anticompetitive acts which, collectively, increase wealth and power inequality and destroy democracy“).
Two-faced politicians win elections, using vocabulary and social-net analysis to microtarget political messages. Scammers target seniors with dementia using syntax analysis. Surveillance pricing is used to jack up the prices you pay, based on mood analysis of text you write.
Maybe offtopic, but if you use a regular e-mail client with Autocrypt compatibility it works fine with DC.