Hosted a relay to avoid censorship in Russia and keep in touch with family.
Configured domain, deployed chatmail relay on VPS in Russia, never touched.
Today (5 Jun 2026) it stopped working (either when connect from within Russia, or outside): status “connecting” in app, messages not delivered.
https://chat.*domain name* page is available.
Tried to create a new profile using android app: it stucks on “On moment… 60%”, then fails with Configuration failed. Error: CAPABILITY command error: io: timed out: timed out
If i enable russian VPN, it shows “Connected” in app, but cant deliver messages
I suspect some tricky DPI.
How to collect useful debug info to find out what happened?
What to do now?
The domain name (and probably the IP as well) of your instance got burned. This happens.
Stop the VPS, clone the VM and start it under a new IP address and domain name. If you are lucky, switching subdomains might be sufficient, but there are no promises. Or the least hassle would be to reinstall it on a separate node.
Anyway, you can view server logs using journalctl and inspect traffic using tcpdump or tshark.
Developers are aware of the problem, there are many similar reports starting today with similar symptoms (timeout on IMAP connection after CAPABILITY command). At the moment there is no need for more logs from Delta Chat. It is unlikely that your specific relay is blocked and there is no quick solution like changing the address or moving to another server.
There is unfortunately no solution for users or relay operators yet, but there are people looking at the problem.
Looks like DPI are blocking specific Delta chat connection patterns, it’s happening even with non-chatmail servers. Some custom servers are working with custom build clients.