Hello, potential new user here.
I want to introduce DC at my workplace and my kids school to replace whattsapp. And i have the power to do so.
But:
The shools secretary has to be able to send infos/newsletters to a group consisting of all parents, not revealing the individual emailadresses to every member of the group, and all answers go only to the secretary, not the group.
The teachers should be able to send to a group without revealing the mailadresses of the members, but all answers are visible to all group members.
These requirements fit to this discussion, i wanted to add this real life scenario to it.
to the questions: both are solvable by some server-side newsletter software that is configured accordingly.
the first point seems to be rather simple - a newsletter that sends out a normal, individual mail for each recipient, for the recipients in delta chat, this appears as a 1:1 chat then, the list of all recipients is never sent out, answers just go to the email address in From:-header
for the second point, in addition, answers from recipients have to be resent by the server to all group members by impersonating the sender. also this should be doable.
changes in delta chat are not needed for both points.
im am not an expert in newsletter software, however, i know there are solutions out there that will fit
btw, i think this open standard, to do whatever is required in a given situation, based on open standards and existing solutions, is one of the biggest advantages of Delta Chat compared to most other messengers.
Thank you, r10s.
But these solutions happen outside of DC.
While other messengers do have a broadcast function integrated, and show members of a group by name only (but this last I am not sure of…).
I order to be better than whattsapp DC has to be just as easy while revealing less.
“Without having to become a server admin” is the point. The whish for broadcast functionality already came up before (see link), i should have posted there i guess.
Thank you testbird!
I was not aware that, once i have a persons email as contact in DC, ALL emails from this emailaddress are shown ONLY in DC!
If thats the case, this is a killer.
This could only be circumvented by creating a new emailadress solely for DC use.
I know this is no big deal and would be the best anyway, but this is already too much asked for from the casual user. Unfortunatedly, but think of your cousin, aunt, neighbour…
I have to test this next week.
Well, as you seem to already have noticed very quickly, separate accounts are not as good as it may appear first, they are actually detrimental to the basic idea of avoiding separate “silo” spaces.
These are just a hand full of usability issues, but they need and can be solved best within deltachat.
Thank you (to you and all the developers of DetlaChat) for making an independent and universal messenger!
Reading through the forum I got confused though.
Many posts sound like DC is about making a mailhandler with chat-interface.
But I think the idea was to make a messenger, like but better than whatsapp, signal and so on, based on the existing email infrastructure.
Therefore there is no need to see regular mails in DC for example, as it was suggested somewhere in the Forum.
I have several Emailprograms on several devices which do this expertly and comfortably. No need for another one.
I fear that the development of DC might be slowed down by focusing on making it another Mailprogramm, instead of making it a messenger.
This is just my opinion as a simple user.
But, maybe, simple users are the target group for DC, so i thought this opinion could be useful.
For example, interacting with email list servers, but foremost the major feature to be able to chat with every existing email address requires some extent of email compatibility.
If you look at the changelog and commits, unfortunately, development has taken up many new other things than fixing the hand full of already half-working, long-pending basic usability issues.
How about you help with developing @testbird instead of always criticizing that your priorities aren’t the first for the developers?
Your passive aggressive tone against the developers annoys me.
At the moment our priority is to bring the rust core to all platforms and make it stable. This allows deltachat to be compiled more easily and also a windows version is now possible. Also iOS is lacking behind, so it gets more attention right now.
Don’t get me wrong here, I still appreciate that your very active in the important discussions, but it would be even nicer if you would drop that passive aggressiveness.
@simon, how about you stop being active agressive just because I have a different opinion than you? And a smiley at the end doesnt make things better.
I am just a user, and I have biggest respect for people who know how to code. If I could help, I would.
I just fear that DC might lose track pf becoming a messenger, might be slowed down by tendencies to make it a full fledged MUA with a chat-UI.
DC has a great potential with all the people annoyed by whattsapp, but as a messenger.
If I had read about Delta Mail, i wouldnt have been interested. Delta Chat is a whole different story.
By giving my opinion I wanted to counterbalance and try to take pressure off the developers to implement things which are not first priority.
I did not criticize the developers (I think, I dont know who is a developer and who isnt) but others who want a one-for-everything solution.
Oh, a smiley:
My post was addressed to testbird, not to you @PaulBemter. Maybe you over-read that.
It’s not about my opinion what delta-chat should or shouldn’t be.
This is what I mean. For me it reads like “oh the developers don’t do their job properly”, maybe thats meant as a Push to push the developers in the right direction… I don’t know… maybe @testbird can share his motivation behind it.
But I don’t want to turn this thread into a discussion about testbird, I just want testbird to stop with this, because it annoys me.
Hi Simon, sure let me explain, where do you get that from?
There’s this thing with framing pictures, and comparing opinions. They can make one see things in different ways.
It’s not so obvious who is a developer in this forum, so I wasn’t aware you are one before you wrote “our priority”.
PaulBemter introduced himself, appearing to me as new deltachat user, but reasonably seasoned and ambitious.
I think he may benefit from the experience of deltachat users, just as the developers, for introducing deltachat to new users. Allowing to avoid a pitfall or two, and to get a perspective on the expectations, he may have.
Paul expressed qualms about “full MUA” features, and I think he got a couple of responses explaining that proper email interaction is a crucial feature, for not just being yet another messenger, but becoming an Email-chat messenger that can work separately and cooperatively with traditional emails.
I don’t think email cooperation would be much of a slow down, because mostly it is already working. Code is there, it would just need some rearrangements for a reachability setting and the simple “all emails” (chat view) [The perfect “emails organized by the list of contacts” (chat list view) is not crucial to allow reaching out to an email contact with a chat, and can wait.]
Still, just simply providing a better name for listing the incoming emails has been a long standing issue Better name for “Contact requests” issue #5 since Oct. 2017, at least it has not been closed “for discussion” without any fix, as so many others.
It’s just a description, so what in particular do you consider wrong?
It would be irritating, should it contain something that should not be told publicly.
Were just more details missing?
For me it reads like “oh the developers don’t do their job properly”.
I don’t know, what is their job? Where do you get that frame?
Is there really no fun in solving things properly, anymore? More suggestions towards some political agenda, even demagoguery, anti-factual dogmas, shouting about some words, and building up an in-group and defensiveness? Xyiv -- off and online developments, on and off-topic [long]
Steps like introducing the “show emails” option and it’s default “no”, can look like splitting and degrading deltachat towards just yet another messenger, instead of leting options work more broadly and cooperatively (combining common needs and ideas into quite universal configurability).
In any case, after the project has taken funds, the first priority has not appeared to be put to fixing or improving problems that were reported publicly about already released features, even if they were found to be detrimental to the universal usability.
As most points of the article discussed here have already been reported long before, so that the article would not have had to suffer from them, it seems rather realistically to moderate newcomer expectations about improvements. Yes, I wish things could improve, and I had worked on listing and summarizing the most basic usability issues, so that they might not get lost in the forum like this topics findings, but get fixed maybe an-issue-a-week, eventually.
You’re right we should already solve the subject manner and the contact request naming manner. I agree.
Believe it or not that was actually a community request. “I don’t want to get emails in deltachat, I have my mail program/app for that.”
I think we could solve such problems with a better help site that explains everything and maybe a small wizard at the first start of the app. But actually such a wizard is a risk, because most people want to use it simply as a messenger and have already an email app connected to that, and might be scared away by such a wizard.
Not to mention that WhatsApp is not only through the network effect as successful as it is, but also because the simple 2 step setup:
Put in your phonenumber
recieve the sms and put - in the code (they even do that step automaticaly if you give them access to your sms messages)
