Since I’m not using Delta Chat yet (I have just discovered this amazingly different approach to instant messaging today), I’m not sure how this all fits together.
So afaik all that belongs to Delta Chat gets moved to a DeltaChat folder on the IMAP server by the Delta Chat app, right?
What if I want to use Delta Chat with several different email address aliases on the same email account, lets say my regular email address (featuring my name) and another one with a nickname to stay anonymous?
Does the current Delta Chat (Android) app support multiple accounts or does it require the use of multiple devices?
Does this work with multiple email aliases on the same email account or does it require a separate email account for each email address used for Delta Chat?
Is it useful to reuse an existing email address for the use with Delta Chat or is it better to use an own email address (alias or email account) just for Delta Chat?
Delta chat supports the use of multiple accounts. Currently, however, it does not handle multi-account notifications, so if messages arrive to an account other than the selected one, you will not receive notifications until you change account. I think the delta chat team is already working to enable multi account notifications.
In these days I tested quite intensively the use of delta chat with a main account and two aliases. Aliases are considered separate accounts from delta chat so you have to create an account for each address. In addition to the multi-account notifications problem I’ve found some problems with duplicate messages and read receipts received on the main account. Currently I don’t recommend to use both main and alias accounts at the same time, but to use only the main account or the alias. As far as I know in the next version there should be improvements in the management of aliases.
Does that mean it’s using the same DeltaChat folder on the IMAP server for all aliases and the main email account address, or does it use a separate folder for each email address in that same IMAP account?
So that problem can be prevented by using a dedicated IMAP account for each Delta Chat account instead of using aliases?
I have several different email accounts, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I was just wondering how this can work if using aliases within a single IMAP account, but it’s not a must-have usage case for me.
Still I would like to be able to manage at least two Delta Chat accounts within the same app, so that I can make use of my regular email address and an anonymous one.
What do you mean by “at the same time”?
If you create two Delta Chat accounts, one on your main email account address and one with an alias email address within the same IMAP account, is there a way to not use both at the same time within the same Delta Chat app?
Using multiple addresses with the same DeltaChat folder behind all of them does not work properly, Delta Chat will not recognize incoming mails as sent to other alias but will think it got BCCd into some other conversation an create a group each time. So it’s better to just use completely separate accounts.
That problem could be prevented by simply being able to optionally set the DeltaChat folder name manually for each Delta Chat account, or is this already possible?
Then you can have multiple DeltaChat folders within the same IMAP acount.
This is not currently possible to do and in any case would not be sufficient to solve the problem with aliases because:
As I understand the problem with aliases is that the received mails all end up in the same inbox folder and for each message received by the alias deltachat creates a group formed by the alias user, the user of the primary mail and the user who sent the message and then moves everything in the deltachat folder.
A workaround would be to set a filter to receive mails addressed to the alias in a dedicated folder different from the inbox and to have the possibility to configure different folders for each account, both for incoming mail and for moving mails once received by delta chat.
But I’m not a programmer so I don’t know if this is the best solution or the easiest and functional to implement.
@darhma Indeed, all emails addressed to any aliases are received in the same inbox and my email provider does not offer any server side filtering (which would be possible with manage-sieve).
So to make this possible, the Delta Chat app would need to be able to identify incoming emails in two ways, first that it concerns Delta Chat at all as a chat message and second which email address it was sent to to be sorted into the correct DeltaChat folder, plus of course the app would need to either generate individual DeltaChat folders per email address automatically or would have to offer to set a custom folder on account setup.
Overall way too complicated, so it’s better to just stick to one Delta Chat account per email account and not use any additional alias email addresses for Delta Chat at at all.
The problem is that if you receive a message with unknown address in the To field, it may either be your alias or someone else’s address and you are Cc’d or Bcc’d into the conversation. To distinguish between these two cases you need to know all your aliases in advance. We can of course allow user to specify all their aliases during configuration to support this case.
By the way, there is some work to better support aliases, but it is about a bit different thing:
From what I understand this would be a similar solution to identities (in k9mail, for example). This way you could have a single account that receives and sends either from the main address or from one or more aliases. If you could keep the receiving/sending of messages congruent (if I start a chat using the alias all replies must be received by the alias and all future sent messages must be sent from the alias address) it would be, in my opinion, a good solution, not too different from how other clients work. Maybe it would be good to add a request about what address to use when starting a chat.
I ended up in sticking to a single Delta Chat account for which I created a dedicated email account.
That way I have Delta Chat completely separated, no switching around and no mess with missing notifications and aliases (which don’t make any sense anyway, as they share the same email account).
I’ll probably revisit the multiple account idea if that feature gets properly implemented, but until then a single account just will have to do.
Using multiple From: addresses and recognizing mails sent to them as sent to us has been requested recently:
Here the problem of multiple chat for the same sender is caused by Delta Chat creating a new chat with 3 members (itself, an alias, and the sender contact) for each mail received with an alias in the To: field:
A simple solution is to allow to configure multiple “self” addresses and mark one of them as primary used for sending. The problem I see here is that if someone adds your alias address to some chat, other members will not recognize you as a member when you send a message there from your primary address.
To solve this Delta Chat needs to have multiple “self” contacts, so you can participate in different chats as different aliases. This also means that for each contact you can have multiple 1:1 chats and can participate in some group as two different aliases. All of this has to be presented in the UI somehow.