First login to the account imports all my emails

Mutual Help
1

Hello,
First time here :vulcan_salute:,
thanks to the team for the app :+1:

Some context… As an email user I do not archive any emails. So all my emails are stored in inbox.
When I connect the deltachat client it syncs all my emails and the only option I found is to delete them one by one and create the rooms for conversations.

Maybe I miss something, can you help ?

Delta Chat version

Version 1.36.4 (git: flathub)

Expected behavior

Don’t import my whole mailbox. Just let me choose before the connection if I want to or not

Actual behavior

import my whole mailbox

Steps to reproduce the problem

  1. add account
  2. sync
  3. all my inbox emails as conversation
2

Only the last 100 messages should be fetched, but link2xt recently fixed a bug where sometimes the whole inbox was fetched: fix: fetch at most 100 existing messages even if EXISTS was not received by link2xt · Pull Request #4383 · deltachat/deltachat-core-rust · GitHub.

So, in the next version, there should be a lot fewer chats already.

3

We could also think about lowering this value, like, only importing the newest 50 messages.

4

Thanks @Hocuri
Perhaps you could also leave the option of “no import” and have the user create their conversations?
Getting the team on board was very complicated because of the import. Like me, they were convinced by the interest of managing mails in a conversational format.
Everyone has been waiting for Ditching Slack Messenger.
But the mass import of messages was a negative episode.
Especially as they can only be deleted one at a time.

5

Asking questions to the user is always difficult, because many users just want to get on with things, and making decisions breaks their flow.

Maybe we need some way to multi-select chats on DC Desktop, though I’m not sure how the UI would look (and then, we’d also need someone from the Desktop team to implement it, who are currently understaffed).

What’s the underlying problem? I mean, if you wait for some weeks, won’t you also get 100 new chats (at least if you use email as much as me), which you have to either ignore (that’s what I usually do), or delete/archive?

6

Maybe asking during setup is the best time?
[ ] Import my first 100 emails as conversation
[ ] Create my conversations from scratch

For the multiple selection it can be good if you want to delete the imported emails easily

I plan to use deltachat as a replacement for slack. So I’ll create conversation rooms and invite people.
I’m still managing my emails in thunderbird

7

Another option is to use a separate e-mail address for the chat, if you want to separate chat from e-mail. You can also use the “Clear chat” to delete all messages.

Nevertheless the feature to select and delete several chat messages at once on desktop is a feature I also miss.

1 Like
8

So, you are setting “Show All E-Mails” to “No, only Chats”? Or do you also want your new classical emails to be shown in DC, just not old ones?

Using a separate e-mail for DC also gets you rid of some other annoyances.

+1