Due to the fact that Delta Chat is growing and increasingly replacing third-party applications for me. I’ve already moved a lot of people here. I use it both at work and in the family sphere. Recently, Delta Chat has begun to replace my personal media content storage, and it is convenient, and with a built-in search for this content. Only one thing is missing. Of course, there are restrictions on the size of the transferred file on the server side, why not add a personal, local chat where messages will be saved without transmission through the server, thereby without size restrictions. It is very comfortable. Of course, there will be no synchronization with other devices, and I think so far it is not necessary, in the future it will be possible to solve this problem by synchronizing data in parts with a size of, for example, 5MB. Or just use a personal local chat on different devices.
If I were in charge, I wouldn’t put much effort into this, except it was a side effect of some other bigger feature.
I’ve also been using messenger apps for my personal notes and a bit of storage, and I’ve come to realize that it’s best to search for specialized tools instead.
A messenger app should be about messaging first.
I know it takes effort to find and get used to new software, but still.
For media storage I’d recommend to try Immich and its alternatives. For personal notes: Obsidian and its alternatives.
I’ve even had an idea to put such recommendations to the “Saved Messages” section in Delta Chat directly.
As to file size transfer limit, see this related topic Smarter message size limit.
If a profile is only used on one device, you can turn off “Send Copy to Self”.
Then all messages to yourself will only be saved locally. However, this only works if it is not a chatmail account.
Thanks for your great feedback, happy it works well for you 
Media content storage is surely an interesting possible interesting development. Delta chat actually contains technology that could help with “synchronizing” storage across devices, for example https://iroh.network – but it’s not currently a priority, just some ongoing discussions in the background. Basically our ability to do things depends on many factors, of which money is one but also not the only constraint. So rest assured, at least parts of the devs are thinking about media content storage. It’s maybe more likely something regarding storage first happens on the https://webxdc.org but maybe wait for the upcoming blog post to hear more details
Why doesn’t it work if it is a chatmail account?
because there a copy to self is always enabled, you can disable it only in non-chatmail accounts
Thanks for the reply, but the answer seems tautological to me, and I don’t understand it at a deeper level.
“Send Copy to Self” seems to me intuitively like it should be a client-side feature and therefore independent of the server (i.e. if you disable “Send Copy to Self”, it would make sense that the client never sends anything to the server if it detects you are only sending to yourself). However it seems my understanding of this is wrong.
One of the main ideas of chat mail was to provide an ideal scenario for using and onboarding to delta chat.
Like super easy way to get into delta chat and use it, without having the technical barrier of finding/having a good email provider or the need to understand advanced settings.
We made some choices, like removing some advanced settings from the ui when you are using a chat mail server. In this case turning “Send Copy to Self” off would break multi-device setups, so we provide a better out of the box experience by taking away the option to mess this up on chat mail.
Through settings simplification and hiding them on chatmail is mainly important for settings like:
- “Auto Delete from Server” → limited options, because chatmail server automatically deletes all messages after X days, so you can’t really control it from the client side besides choosing immediate deletion.
- the IMAP folder watch settings → chatmail profiles only have one IMAP folder and no moving of messages to a “Delta Chat” folder, because on chatmail the usage of using a classical email client side by side with Delta Chat is not supported.
You can still use non-chatmail accounts for full control. Delta Chat has first-class support for using multiple profiles/accounts simultaneously.
I previously assumed the client app was server agnostic, but if I understand you correctly, it is aware of which server the profile is using and then displays or hides options such as “Send Copy to Self” based on which server the profile is using.
An alternative option, instead of hiding the “Send Copy to Self” option, would be to display a warning message that it breaks sync for multi-device setups when the user disables this option, and to repeat the warning and offer to automatically enable “Send Copy to Self” when the user selects “Add Second Device”, which seems like a good balance of flexibility and usability to me, and reasonably foolproof, but maybe this would lead to other unforseen problems or maybe it’s not worth the developer effort to change the way it currently works.
I read that recent updates to Delta Chat include changes likes “new, single-device chatmail profiles default to Delete Messages after Download”, and “delete messages from a chatmail server immediately by default”. In this context, does it still make sense to have “Send Copy to Self” enabled out of the box while also deleting messages after download? And if Delta Chat can default to “Delete Messages after Download” without messing things up for people who want to add a second device, wouldn’t the same apply for “Send Copy to Self”, or am I missing something?
This is one of the things I love about Delta Chat!
While I don’t understand all of the details involved, it seems to me like a contradiction to enable “Send Copy to Self” in order to prevent breaking multi-device setups while at the same time having “new, single-device chatmail profiles default to Delete Messages after Download” and “delete messages from a chatmail server immediately by default”.
Indeed this seems to be a small glitch. In reality, the advanced “send-copy-to-self” should be shown to be off, when “delete-immediatedly-from-server” is on, because no message is actually sent to self then. I created an issue on core Set send-copy-to-self to off, when delete-immediately-after-download is on · Issue #6340 · deltachat/deltachat-core-rust · GitHub
ah, which platform are you talking about, using here? Desktop?
I was writing in regards to comments by others above, for example Raiden and Asiel wrote that “Send Copy to Self” only works for non-chatmail accounts and Simon explained that this was to prevent breaking multi-device setups for chatmail accounts, however this reasoning doesn’t make sense to me given that recent updates to Delta Chat include changes likes “new, single-device chatmail profiles default to Delete Messages after Download”, and “delete messages from a chatmail server immediately by default”.