Email reliability is falling, its security is nil, and its content model has been stagnant for decades. It’s no longer acceptable for business communications.
A huge variety of services & sites send time-sensitive and/or private information to their members/customers electronically. Those that can afford it do this via custom phone apps, or SMS texts containing URLs to a customer portal. All the rest are forced to rely on email, which is not suitable for urgent or confidential content.
Protocols like SMTP & Matrix were designed to connect anyone on the Internet with anyone else. That entails one or more third party intermediaries to relay messages; such entities incur costs, present external points of failure or attack, and may scan/monetize traffic. Using TMTP, organizations can exchange messages with their customers/members directly, without intermediate hosts.
I would like to know the opinion of everyone here if it would make any sense to implement tmtp in delta-chat android. So have you all thought about adding TMTP support to delta-chat?
Actual behavior
Delta.chat only accepts smtp and not tmtp, so why?
SMS is really any more secure than email with TLS. phone provider can read it as well, same as email providers when the emails are not encrypted. Also you just need one malicious app on your phone that has the sms reading permission, or sometimes an attacker just needs one call to your tel-co provider to convince them to send them a replacement sim card which they can use to read all your sms and steal all your accounts that are foolish enough to consider SMS a second factor.
So no SMS is not really more secure or private than email with TLS transport encryption between providers (which is standard these days).
Now about tmtp, if you read their site you will notice that it’s completely different from email architecture wise. It’s not compatible with email the way POP and JMAP are. Also the companies can directly collect the user’s ip address (and thus also their rough location), because users connect directly to the companies server. Also TMTP is for business <-> customer, not for normal usage from what I can tell.
PS: I’m again wondering if you just want to troll with your unrealistic proposals.
I would like to contribute to delta-chat, in this process of contributing to delta-chat I have to check what my possibilities are. So when you say that, I get really sad: “PS: I’m again wondering if you just want to troll with your unrealistic proposals.” - I would like to help delta-chat in some way, I research various ideas and possible implementations.
I’m not a troll, really what I ask is just a question, my goal is not to take a discussion lightly.
I really thought the tmtp protocol would be interesting for delta-chat. But with your feedback I realized that this is a mistake. I’m always happy with your feedback, because most of the time I think I have an interesting idea and I see I’m wrong.