Groups with clasic email users (no DC-client)?

[schrotie]

Is it possible to have Delta Chat groups with mixed Delta Chat users and classical email user who use a classical email client? If yes, how do classical email users address the group?

Delta Chat version

2.49 (Linux), 2.51 (Android)

[WofWca]

No, it’s not possible. Either all messages are encrypted, or none.

[ian]

Somewhat related:

Document the minimum requirements necessary for chatmail interoperability

The effort of documenting all above mentioned implementation details and publishing a full independent implementation based on that in a clean room methodology would strengthen the promise of openness and sustainability. I see you have copy & pasted some of the valuable information here across at least 3 comments. Could you please deduplicate it and consolidate all of it in the top post and perhaps even convert it to a wiki via the admin menu?

[schrotie]

And it’s not possible to have a group with no encrypted messages at all?

[ian]

The question is two-faced. You may focus on clients lacking any kind of encryption, but note that you could maintain encrypted contacts outside DC clients as well. I think as long as you patched those clients (or added the group ID header manually through the UI), such a client might be able to chat in a group, but this is just a guess.

[WofWca]

It is possible, but only for “classic” (non-Chatmail) profiles (e.g. Gmail):

[schrotie]

Ugh, I didn’t quite get this at first. So now I did some testing, and indeed it works! However, when the mail-account(s) respond with a mail, that won’t land in the original group, right? At least it didn’t in my test. Is there a way to make that work, too? I’m checking for alternatives to WhatsApp with “normal” people …

And thanks a lot for your reponses!

[WofWca]

@schrotie

However, when the mail-account(s) respond with a mail, that won’t land in the original group, right? At least it didn’t in my test.

I am pretty sure that this should work, as long as the email is a proper “reply”. I’m not completely sure what qualifies as such. Probably the In-Reply-To header or the email subject.

[schrotie]

Well, I tried, original message ID from delta chat and In-Reply-To header (from Evolution) were identical but the message did not land in the group in Delta-Chat, but in a DM Chat with the user with that Email address …

Ugh, nope, you’re right, it works. Evolution did not send to another email address of mine (in spite of reply-all, trying to be too cleaver here), so that it correctly did not go into the group. But after adding that other address (which is also in the group for testing), it works. This could just maybe legit work.

Thanks a bunch!