Expected behavior: everyone in my chats is available as a contact, for instance available to add to groups
Actual behavior: my contacts list includes only myself, even though I have dozens if not hundreds of conversations, and I cannot therefore create any groups in Delta Chat with more than just myself as a member
Expected behavior: I can read all emails on the server no matter what client I use to access them
Actual behavior: Many conversations begun in Delta Chat cannot be read (including to/from and subject) in other email clients and there is no known way to predict which conversations this will happen to
Steps to reproduce the problem: just basic use of the app
This app was recommended to me some time ago and I’ve loved using it ever since, almost to the point of using it as my exclusive email client.
But, these are some significant hurdles to daily use. The contacts problem especially is almost a dealbreaker… email is a massively useful networking tool and I can’t actually use Delta Chat for that without group chats. And it’s super confusing and inconvenient to not be able to pick up conversations in another client, for instance my email providers’ web client, which is sometimes unavoidably necessary depending on where I’m working from physically.
To the first one, this changed recently. You first have to initiate a direct chat with a participant in an existing group. Only then can you add that person to your other group.
To the second one, DC stores conversations in its own database, not on the server, but you probably already know this.
Why are you forced to use webmail? Could you share why you can not use DC on your mobile that is with you all the time or install DC on the device that you have at your other place?
To the first part, how does that not create a bootstrapping problem? I.E., if you have an existing chat with a user, but there are no groups chats with that user, how could you get into a group with that user? In any case, this doesn’t seem to suggest why my contacts list includes only myself even though I have dozens or hundreds of conversations ongoing.
And I did not know that DC stores conversations separately from the email server. How does that influence the way these conversations appear in other clients, being that they do appear, just as empty, obscured messages? I had thought it was a key storage problem, for instance I might be able to import a key from DC to another client in order to read DC-initiated conversations. Might this be true?
If you participate in a group with other members, click on the group pane, scroll to the member of interest, click on their name or avatar, then click Send Message. You will then be able to add them to another group.
If you already have a direct message with another user, it becomes your contact and you are able to add them to a shared group.
So what I’ve indicated twice now is that I have dozens or hundreds of direct messages with users, and that none of the users with whom I have these direct messages appear as contacts available to add to groups, and I’m asking for help determining what’s going on there and how to get these users from my direct chats to be available to add to a group.
Also, trying to find out how to read conversations from Delta Chat in other email clients, since of course they’re all using the same server and heretofore it had seemed possible. To add extra detail, not all conversations in Delta Chat are unavailable in other clients, only some, and it’s unclear why some are available and others are not.
Private groups can only be entered by peers whom you had end to end encrypted conversations with in the past - those that you have the public key for. I.e., conversations which are not encrypted do not count. You can check the contacts and public_keys tables in the database to verify the fingerprint and public keys of each of them.