Interesting article in german telecommunication newsletter showing a problem in DC

Hi all,
I’m using DC with mainly my family since half a year. Now I read a article found in

https://www.teltarif.de/delta-chat-messenger-e-mail-test-spam/news/77788.html

page 2 last paragraph
in short (bad?) english words:
DC offers a misuse way for SPAMmers and lacks of legal demands.

As i do not know whether you know about this: Now you should :wink:

Regards
Martin

Thanks for DC. It is great in my opinion. I know and see, it is growing and getting better and better. I agree 100% with pcrocett in Traditional Email Mode

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3 Likes

Hi and welcome,

I never saw this problem. If both sides use Delta Chat you simply can leave the group. Similar to WhatsApp.
There also the problem if someone add your phone number to a group, every group member can see your phone number.

But of course if you not use Delta Chat, you can’t leave the group. So the “Remove from list” Link have to be added to every group message. Maybe inside the signature.
This way for Delta Chat users it would be invisible, but visible for regular mails.

And we need Broadcast lists as I mentioned before:

This feature could be used for e.g. newsletters as described in the article.

1 Like

Unfortunately, I think this may be true.

Earlier, only messages from (auto-approved, or address-book) known contacts appeared in chats, and all other emails where only browsable (separate email INBOX listing).

But instead of fixing the remaining interoperability issues, the devs where driven towards a “keep it stupid” way that blocks all classic emails by default, but presents or asks about all Email-chat compatible messages to the user, and divides the deltachat users reachability…

With a little interest, a solution could cover several issues at once:

I have seen many cases of this issue, people remove Delta Chat, and they think that removing the app will take away all the lot of groups they were in, then they are annoyed by a lot of unwanted messages from that groups and they ask for help since they can not leave the groups from their email clients.

Anyway, I don’t think DeltaChat can be considered an spam tool, there are better software for spammers, and anyway, how you lave a classic “email group”??? I mean if I take Thunderbird and start writing to you and 50 more people, you can’t “leave” my list, I can write to all that people and they can NOT remove by themselves, so this is not an issue of Delta Chat, you just use a blacklist, a filter, or an spam detector, like usual, in the end Delta Chat is just an ergonomic email client

1 Like

This is the comment about what pops up in deltachat with its current “show emails” option: No contact request is poping up (i.e. all chat messages, emails from known contacts)

And that is the case where you don’t want to use Delta Chat, but if you use Delta Chat you can remove an unwanted group and it will not show up again and you can also block users, so blaming Delta Chat because your classic email client isn’t good dealing with spam is not fear :wink:

Regarding the “remaining listed in groups”, an idea could be that, upon uninstalling, deltachat could offer to send remove-me-from-group messages.

The real spam allowing problem of deltachat is, if it accepts all email-chat messages (prompting the user) by default.

about what they said of groups and your email address shared, it is not possible to write in a group if the email addresses of your peers are not know, so what they said of using the BCC only works in one direction for “channels” groups, a solution could be self-hosted “bots” that act as proxy for a group, like a mailing list in the end

that is no issue, Delta Chat only accept Delta Chat users by default, and if you are worried about spam, then you set it to “accepted contacts only” if you set the email interactions to “all” it is because you actually are not afraid of spam and want, well… all

Of course it is a problem, if contrary to the earlier versions, now the default is to present every chat message sent by some new unknown spammer.

The problem can be solved very nicely though, with a flexible, protective combination of options:

And other messages are shown silently:

  • With a “new emails” counter.
  • And only if the reachability setting is broadened and allows it, chat messages and qualifying short emails from unknown contacts are shown as a silent prompt (or even more straight forward as a “tentative chat”).

Do you realize currently there are no such “delta-spammer”, do you? I don’t think any spammer use Delta Chat

@adbenitez Please, I don’t think your thought is going to prevent spammers, as soon as they realize deltachat allows them to send their spam directly to deltachat users’ phones.

it is not directly, it is a contact request, and they can do more harm using a simple command line tool and adding a fake “chat-version” header, thinking that an spammer will use Delta Chat to send spam sounds crazy to me,
On the other hand, right now most people use classic email instead of Delta Chat, so it is a waste of time to target that users, anyway all emails are grouped as a contact request, so it is easy to block, and again, in a classic email is just the same, Delta Chat is not making it any easier to spam an user with this contact request feature :stuck_out_tongue:

You seem actively working towards foreseable failure, and keeping deltachat a non-solution, by granting spammers instant access to the phone messaging (not just email client spam).

I am not saying that trusting other delta chat compatible messages is a good solution in the long run to avoid spam, just that it is not a problem currently and the contact request in Delta Chat don’t open the user is brain and introduce the spammer’s content, you are overreacting, it is just an small notification at the top of the list saying that someone want to chat with you, it doesn’t matter if the spammer sends 1000 messages you get only one entry at the top of the list, I think.

IMHO, missing important emails is worst than receiving some unwanted contacts that you can block, there are not a definitive way to avoid spam anyway, in my personal experience, I don’t use to receive spam, and when I have spam, I just block the email addresses in Delta Chat

Let’s look at the options again, thinking in “I” and “You” is not as good for universal cases.

Will blocking a specific address after dismissing 1000 messages help with future spam?

How is it possible to see, approach and progress to solutions?

What kind of messages [really, if any] would be missed with which of the possible combinations, assuming above set of options?

Why would reducing the reachability to just known contacts (by default or after a while) not be a definite way to prevent spam (not junk messages sent by known contacts).

there are no such 1000 messages shown to the user just ONE contact request you reject it and that is it

I am not talking of my personal use case only, I deal with a lot of delta chat users, and they complain about missing contact request, NO ONE have complained about spam

2 Likes

Good, it surprises me that deltachat aggregates prompts for the same sender.

The article did.

If you’re concerned about user support, why aren’t you even more interested in thinking through the options to prevent future spam from bothering users. Email-chat spam will come up in deltachat, if it is possible. It even seems to have happened in the article by an unknown contact manually adding a public address to a deltachat group.