I think we need to better clear up the email confusion (of the 2.x update and other recent changes)

Feature Proposal
1

In the recent times I have seen quite some users that were confused by the recent changes regarding the relationship between Delta Chat and E-mail. Even I myself was often confused, so I believe we should attempt to further improve our communication on this topic.

The gray avatars of version 2.0, slightly degraded Autocrypt support and removal of key import/export worried me too at first – until I understood the higher purpose and saw the light….

Jokes aside, what this really is about is just removing the never-really-working niche expert use case of “Using Delta Chat on your existing email together with your existing email client”.

Using a dedicated email account is what I have always done and recommended anyway, the reality is that all but a few experts where even able to make this use case work at all.

The idea for reusing your existing email account comes from a time when email accounts were hard to come by, today we have chat mail, which makes account creation super easy.

And there are more changes to come, like removing the Chat-Version header, to leave less metadata, this will break the sieve scripts of that shared-account use case[1]

Communication with email users still works fine once you set up the encryption, and plain-text email is also possible and arguable better by providing a clear separation between unencrypted email and always encrypted chatting (with extra features such as editing and deletion, webxdc and groups).
It now has a dedicated UI to create email threads, which even lets you set the subject and your email contacts won’t see confusing info messages like who was added to the group anymore.
You can clone the thread to add new members, sure there is room for improvement[2], but I believe it is already the right direction.

TL;DR: Long story short Email doesn’t go anywhere: DC just removed support for an option that never really worked well and caused nothing but headaches for us developers and many users who left delta chat and never gave it a real chance because of this.

So I propose making a blog post or good FAQ entry, maybe even announced to users looking for the feature in the app (like a warning when you are about to use a normal email account that already has lot’s of imap folders or messages).

  1. While not supported, you could probably use delta chat only for encrypted emails and keep using your email client for normal emails. But it stays a task for experts, not normal users that are not willing or able to work with server side email filtering rules. ↩︎

  2. Navigating between related threads for example. ↩︎

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2

Maybe the OP post and the following text could provide a starting point for such a blog post:

I heard delta chat has something to do with email, what is that about?

Delta Chat uses the email network as a transport layer for messaging.
At the core it is an email client, but it is also different, as you can not use it on the same email account together with classical email clients.
Here are the different ways you can use delta chat and how they differ.

Chatmail Profile Dedicated Email Account Shared usage on existing Email account
Description Creating a new Profile on a Chatmail Relay Using a new or existing email account with Delta Chat exclusively. Using your existing email account with Delta Chat, while still simultaneously another Email Client is not supported.
Status Supported and preferred because it gives the best experience Supported Not supported anymore
Experience great depends on provider not supported
Getting an account Very easy and fast, no personal info required Depends on provider, most want all kinds of personal information, like address and telephone number -
Choosing an Instance or Provider Chatmail: Relays https://providers.delta.chat/ -
Who can I communicate with? Delta Chat Users and Encrypted Email Users. Delta chat users and all Email Users, even plain old plain-text email if you enable that in the settings. -
History Introduced in 2023, out of frustration with existing email providers we made chat mail relays to provide a better user experience and easy onboarding for new users. Part of Delta Chat from the very start.
Will stay an option for censorship resistance.		 In the past we tried to support this use-case, but it never worked well: hard to set up correctly, complicated to maintain, many problems.

So in 2025 we decided to stop supporting it, to focus on the other two working options.

The problems of “Shared usage on existing Email account”

  • Double notifications (in DC and their provider’s email app)
  • Cluttered inbox with encrypted delta chat emails
  • Users trying to manually manage their encryption keys, allowing them to make mistakes like importing their ancient (meanwhile weak) encryption keys.
  • The mere presence of the key management options confused a lot of users, some mistook “export key” for backup export.

Some of these issues might be solvable, but not for the average non-technical users.
You may be able to make it work for your use case, but you are on your own in figuring out solutions for the problems, we recommend using a dedicated Email Account or hosting your own Chatmail Relay

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