Interesting article in german telecommunication newsletter showing a problem in DC

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

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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.

the article was worried about spam in classic email client not in Delta Chat (they were worried about people using Delta Chat to send spam) the case they describe was that some user using Delta Chat, added they email address (one they check using classic email clients) and that they were no able to leave the group, which anyway would happen if an annoying user write that emails in a classic email app, they can’t avoid people sending emails to them, they just have to blacklist that user, this is not an issue introduced by Delta Chat, it is just how email works currently

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So, that actually is exactly the case of an unknown user spamming an address using email-chat headers.

Of course deltachat can’t do anything about classic clients. (They usually suffer from spam.)

But deltachat can prevent such spam to show up in the messenger’s chat, by restricting the full reachability to messages from known addresses, by default. (And having the options outlined above.)

That could be build into deltachat:

Support for creating “relay groups” in deltachat, and therefore becoming an admin of them.

In such groups the admin would send out messages to the group using BCC, and all members can technically only respond to the admin(s). But if this group is a full relay group, instead of just a news feed, the admins’ deltachat instance(s) could automatically BCC-forward the replies and messages received from a valid member, to all members.

If the deltachat instances of the members could deduplicate the messages locally, the relay group could even support multiple admins and relay-instances (for redundancy and fallback).

Back to the topic of the article.
Its interesting in my personal opinion, but its also a bit misleading to read.
My comment/thoughts on it:

A link to unsubscribe/leave a group: Where should this link lead to? (dc has own no servers) the only option I could think of would be a mailto link that lets you sent a predefined message that dc clients could recognize and remove you from the group. But I’m not sure whether mailto links work in all email clients. (The point is that the most people that see a link probably think it leads to a website)

That point about spammers is not a real point: even plain Thunderbird or a simple php script is better suited for spamming.

The next funny point is “The privacy is broken, because you can see email addresses” - For email you need email addresses, it’s not possible to hide email addresses when you have a normal group (for mailing lists and channels its another topic the latter one would use bcc, but there you can’t write in the group. Also both are not implemented at time of writing, for progress on those see New feature: Group Types)
Also you can get an anonymous email addresses dedicated only for your deltachat account, so nobody can spam you on your main email email-address.

I continue in german:
“Außerdem fehlte in den Mails die gesetz­lich vorge­schrie­bene Abmel­demög­lich­keit (Opt-out) bei dem Grup­penver­sand” - Soweit ich weiss gilt das nur fuer newsletter und mailinglisten.
Naja sehen wir dass ganze “Datenschleuder” gerede mal als hilfe schrei nach den newsletter features :wink:

Fazit:
Der Artikel ist missverstaendlich, weil suggeriert Gruppen seien unsicher und bedenklich, dabei meint er nur die Gruppen, die als Newsletter verwendet werden.

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