Currently, users are not reachable by email, there is only the option to “show emails”.
The “show emails” option has not been a good fit, neither for closed chat-clients-only user groups, nor the average user that also knows some email contacts. The reason is that it is not actually adjusting the reachability, it neither allows to reduce nor expand it as needed for the use-case.
I think a slight adaption would improve the “show emails” option a lot for all users. Even without any of further customization options as designed here.
If the “Show emails?” option instead becomes…
Who should be allowed to contact you directly in Delta Chat?
(Be reachable in Delta Chat by? )
- Nobody (chats only started by you)
- Known contacts (address book and email-approved)
- Everybody (beware of spam)
Default: “known contacts”
… the question would not imply any fragmentation in the email-to-chat interaction possibilities of the deltachat users any more.
(The question of email-to-chat interaction could be better solved by a start-chat metric for email messages. )
Above question would allow to properly separate the email-visibility option, while allowing good defaults depending from the interaction decision.
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I came accross a new aspect, and possibly the perfection 
, that above solution would allow to create.
When all incoming, proper chat massages create new chats automatically (according to the selection who is allowed), there could be very seldom (silent) prompts for emails that only almost match the short chat style format.
It would allow (silent) prompting for proper chat messages from accounts that are not allowed to directly appear in a new chat.
Such prompting for “not to be accepted directly” chat messages could be enabled default, or only optional.
What are your thoughts on the default here?
I think having such prompting enabled by default, could prevent that new users might totally miss incoming chat messages, i.e. after installing and connecting to an IMAP server that is kept empty (well cleaned up), due to the good default to only allow known contacts. (When there are zero known contacts to begin with, incoming chats would not be noticed otherwise.)
Who should allowed to contact you directly Delta Chat?
- Started in DeltaChat (only emails from chats started by you)
- Known contacts (only emails in address book and emails approved in DC)
- Any email address (beware of spam)
Fully agree that “known contacts” is a better default + slightly edited the tooltip.
I was just about to open a feature request to make ‘known contacts’ the default.
I’ve noticed that people who I’ve introduced to deltachat, all were a bit overwhelmed by seeing their whole inbox appear.
Perhaps the average expectation of an email-user is to use deltachat for cherry-picking new chats, and their desktop emailclient as a powerinterface.
Personally I was also struggling a bit to get certain chats into deltachat.
This was my userstory:
- installed deltachat
- saw my whole email inbox appear
- went to settings > Show Classic E-mails
- selected ‘No, chats only’
- I tried setting the deltachat-label in my gmail interface to enable chats for existing emailtraffic
- noticed it didn’t work (as this is not a feature)
- went back into settings and selected ‘For accepted contacts’
hello @leonvankammen that problem was already solved, it was a bug in Delta Chat, you and other users will no longer see the whole inbox be loaded on installation!