It seems to me that with recent UI updates, there is no longer the option to type an email address when creating a new chat. Is this true, or have I have overlooked something?
Expected behavior
After selecting “create new chat” and “add new contact”, there is the option to type an email address as well as scan the QR code of a contact.
Actual behavior
After selecting “create new chat” and “add new contact”, there is no option to type an email address, only the option to scan the QR code of a contact.
This is only the case for chatmail profiles, normal email profiles still have the option.
Why? Because chatmail profiles can not send unencrypted messages, you also need the pub-key of your recipient to establish contact. This is what invite links and sharing contacts as vcards from delta chat are for.
I personally think it would be nice to communicate this better in the app. Like show a add via email button, but instead of doing it, present an info screen educating the user in simple terms that they should either use invite links / qr codes – or create a classical (non-chatmail) email profile.
A mockup I made a while back on this (but got no feedback yet from the relevant actors):
I understood that chatmail profiles could still send unencrypted messages to other addresses on the same server. In fact I’ve done this in the past and I have found this to be a useful workaround in specific circumstances when scanning the QR code was not convenient or possible. (In these situations I can still verify the fingerprint if security is important in these cases.)
Also, it seems to me that it is then also no longer possible to send a message to the xstore bot.
I understand the advantages and the importance of scanning QR codes but I feel the immediate effect of the UI change as an unnecessary hindrance.
This was mostly introduced for technical reasons to avoid breaking existing tests which used chatmail accounts for testing and test Autocrypt as well. This can be changed as CI now uses a dedicated chatmail server for these purposes.
We should probably make it impossible to send unencrypted messages to the same server eventually. This possibility encourages users to onboard on the same server.
While it’s true that chatmail server may soon only allow sending e2e-encrypted messages, i am skeptical that simply not showing the “add contact manually” option is good UI. Menu entries/actions that are sometimes available and sometimes not, are basically confusing, and can cause failures when one person instructs another to do something ("what do you mean? I have no ‘add contact manually’ etc.) Maybe it’s better to show add-contact-manually greyed out and if you tap it a digalogue of “you can only send end-to-end encrypted messages …” and provide the hints for links and QR codes?
but in this case for most people that would be using chatmail accounts it will be disabled so it will be like an unused option, I think in this case it is better not to have the option, in general adding contact manually without encryption is not something recommendable
While we may regard chatmail-server usage as recommended and the default, classic mail servers are also supported and a “add contact manually” makes sense, is useful (i often use it, but i also think anyone who uses delta chat at least partially as an e-mail client, does as well).
My opinion is still to have the option always and on chatmail it opens some info screen instead of the add contact screen. (Like the mockup I posted above) - Easy to implement and with decent wording the user organically learns about one of the differences between chatmail and classic email account usage.
Kinda like those “pay to unlock feature” screens that are a common UI element, just without the payment part.
I have an email profile for my own email address with my own domain. I don’t use encryption.
The manual adding of email address, with which I can then communicate unencrypted, does not work for me.
I use Delta chat unencrypted, because unfortunately all of my contacts do not have Delta-Chat and do not use encryption otherwise.
It works well if they write me first and appear in the email inbox and I have no problems with unencrypted communication when using Delta chat.
Only the manual adding of new email addresses does not work.
You write that you can manually add contacts via known email address. But that doesn’t work for me.
Please tell me very detailed step-by-step, on which way you can add emailadresses manually
Please don’t send me this Link: FAQ - Delta Chat because this is not right:
“If you create a chat profile with a classic e-mail address you may manually create a contact if you know their e-mail address and then write a message to them even if the recipient is not using Delta Chat.”
Thanks @Simon, @link2xt and @hpk for those explanations. It’s good to understand the motivation and the direction Delta Chat is taking with this. When it comes to these types of changes which might confuse existing users like myself (asking “what happened? Did this button disappear?”), I’d recommend mentioning this in the Device Messages, the same way you did when the “Switch Profile” option moved.
I think that in the above discussion one of my questions got overlooked: how is it possible to send a message to the xstore bot using a chatmail account? It seems there is no way to send a message to the bot at the moment.
I was unable to find any invite link for the xtore bot on the Delta Chat website.
In future it might be worth including the xstore bot as a “pre-approved” contact. But at the moment there is no obvious way to contact the bot.
The FAQ and related areas of the website might also need to be updated since they still advise sending a message to the xstore bot, which implies adding the contact manually.
Perhaps one solution to the above debate about whether to include the “Add Contact Manually” button or not is to include it, but rename it to something like “How can I add a contact?”, and don’t gray it out but de-emphasize it and make it look more like a help prompt, and then display an info screen like Simon’s mockup when selected by the user.
Here I answer myself, in the event that other readers of the problem are also interested.
I have discovered that when clicking a mailto link on a website, a new chat with Delta chat can also be opened for non-encrypted communication. The email address is then saved.
Perhaps that would be a workaround if you cannot manually add contacts in Delta-Chat because it is not accepted via the intended control panel.
Please insert this mockup in Delta chat. Just like you designed it. That would be very, very helpful for people who want to manually enter new email address with a normal email account.
Hi there, unfortunately the current version of Delta Chat for Android no longer allows sending messages to normal emails (I’m trying to send to a Gmail user). The Delta Chat interface no longer allows adding contacts via email address, and when I use the Android contact system to send a message to the contact’s email address with Delta Chat it refuses to do so, saying that E2EE is required which is not available for mycontact@gmail.com . So do I understand that from now on Delta Chat will only send messages to other Delta Chat / Autoencrypt users?
