Right now if I want to add someone to a new account, specially if I was already chatting with that someone from other DC account and I know their DeltaChat email, I have to scan a QR or get a link from them OR paste from the clipboard their email as in this
To figure the option to add someone by email took me quite a long time since it is hidden in the 3 dot menu from the top and can only be done by pasting their email address from the clipboard, you cannot even type it.
Righ now new chat gives you
New contact (QR only)
New group
Already added contacts
Expected behavior
Add person by email should have less steps and be a lot clearer than it currently is, let alone allow to just type it in.
It should give us
New contact (QR only)
New contact (by email)
New group
Already added contacts
And on the option by email, allow to just type it in.
in contrast to some years ago, Delta Chat of today is using the email system only to transport or relay messages.
Your chat partner is identified by a cryptographic identity, not by an email address.
coming soon, you can even change the email address or add additional ones, for reliability. the contacts will pick them up as the cryptographic identity did not change.
having a “handle” as other messengers have, of course may be handy in some situations, and there are also ideas around that (we usually are not short in ideas), however, wrt e2ee and user expectations, it has its challenges on its own.
tl;dr for most users, it is best to forget everything about that Delta Chat is using email under the hood, it is just a technical detail, that may even change or be enhanced.
we faded out many occurrences of “email” in the app and in the pages already - but we are very glad if we are pointed to flows or other things we forgot
You have as contact in your Deltachat client, containing a public key and one (or more) e-mail addresses. You send to them via any address. Their DeltaChat client receives from all of thode addreses and presents them in one chat.
this up-front recommendation to try out with classic email is bad, and the first part “wtf is chatmail servers? looks like email once again” I think we should just talk about how fast and pain-free sign up is and not throw a lot of complex/confusing internals into the users
I don’t knw how the planned multitransport will select the e-mail address it uses to send, beyond obviously switching away from those that don’t work.
But the client on the other end will get messages through many e-mail accounts, but will just clump all the e-mails incoming to the same profile together indiscriminately in one chat. The e-mail analogy is helpful here; it is like routing multiple e-mail accounts into one inbox. You can then just read all your nessages in that inbox while ignoring what address they were actually sent to.
Sign up to