I’m new on delta chat and have tested all just with my own accounts… so not really in real live.
I like delta chat a lot but before i introduce the app to my friends i have one question:
Is delta chat spam resistant ? Or do we have to fight spam at the end the same way as we have to do it while we use regular Emails ?
It seams to me that delta chat has not really a resistant way to deal with spam. We can block contacts - but how to prevent in the first place that we get bothered by all kinds of strangers if they got hold on our address / QR Code ?
A new Contact request will reach us even with an alert on our mobile devises.
What can we do if your our contact detail got shared publicity and spamers use it for their mission ?
I’m not someone who’s in charge of the Delta Chat’s philosophy on this front, but:
Not sure if this is much about the Delta Chat clients rather than the email providers, namely the now pushed for “Chatmail”. If you use Delta Chat with a regular email provider (such as Gmail, Outlook) and not Chatmail (e.g. the default Delta Chat provider), then you do get messages from spammers, as “Contact Requests”.
There are some ideas about having contact requests in a separate section, or showing just one notification when you get a contact request, instead of doing that on each message.
See more about the common email spam and Chatmail in the blog post below. In short: if they don’t have your invite link / QR, they can’t message you.
With Chatmail servers, there is a difference between having someone’s email address and having someone’s QR. If they only have an email address, they can’t message you: the server will reject unencrypted email.
The idea is to just not post your QR / invite code publicly, evident by the fact that there is an “Only share it with the people you trust” warning when copying your invite link. See a bit more about this in FAQ - Delta Chat and Why can I only add friends using QR codes and links?.
If you have posted your invite link publicly already, there is a button to “reset QR”, which will make it no longer work, i.e. people cannot get in contact with you using that QR / invite link. A new QR will then be generated which you can then share with “the people you trust”.
Another “tip”: some people utilize multiple Delta Chat profiles / accounts for various “trust circles”. Some more public, some less.
Delta Chat does not have spam reporting and “platform moderation” tools because it is essentially peer-to-peer, the clients exchange messages with each other.
Unlike messengers that have discovery by phone number, your profile is not discoverable without you sharing a QR code or invite link or one of your contacts sharing your contact to someone else. Most problems with having your contact shared too widely can be avoided by having separate profiles, e.g. your family profile and your “public” profile in case you need to share it to strangers.
If you use chatmail relay, you also cannot receive unencrypted mails and your email address is random, so nobody except the relay operator can send you unencrypted spam. We also want to add an option to drop incoming unencrypted messages and enable it by default as a protection against unencrypted spam:
True - and we can turn of notifications for a “public” profile so we will not get bothered by all kinds of strangers to load
and also for trusted circles like “Family” an extra “family” profile will make it work - for sure
… but what about if we want act in groups of 50 members and more… with what kind of profile should act here? Our contacts details will like be shared - so this is a case for the “public” profile - right ?
What about creating for every lager group we want to act in an extra profile - is this the way to set things up ? I guess yes - right?
Yes, a separate profile for each large group is a very good idea! DeltaChat is mostly designed for small groups, though. The moderation tools needed for very large groups do not yet exist.
Yes, having a profile for each event or internet community is probably a good idea. I.e. you can create a profile “Me @ FOSDEM 2026” and share it with people you get to know at FOSDEM. In practice I usually don’t do this and this did not result in any problems in years. Having a publicly joinable online community is generally a not supported usecase for Delta Chat (that’s also why we have this Discourse forum), but if you want to experiment with this anyway, definitely use a separate profile.
It’s probably also not very interesting to spam Delta Chat users because unlike emails addresses and phone numbers as a spammer you cannot compile a spam list from e.g. hacked online shops sorted by country or interests. Just not being contactable by the phone number or email address that you use for registrations is greatly reducing the risk of receiving spam.
Oh noooooooo, please do that not! I collect the links of my contacts. If a link works one time only I will loose contacts, if I have to reinstall on a new device after the old device is defect. DeltaChat becomes more and more paranoid. On this way DeltaChat will become a contact destroyer. It is not still my daily driver messenger. So I have to move back to classy e-mail. DeltaChat isn’t still an easy to use e-mail messenger. It’s now a closed communication tool for paranoid people with an tinfoil hat. I miss the old time when DeltaChat was just an simple e-mail messenger where you could choice to use encrypted messages or unencrypted simple e-mails. I’m done with DeltaChat since the update around March/April 2025. I moved back to Thunderbird and unencrypted classy e-mails.
