No contact request is poping up

If I get a message from a sender who send a mail to me I get no contact request (grey banner in the chat list)

Delta Chat version
0.200.0 Gplay

Expected behavior

Show a contact request for new contacts (messages from a reguler mail client)

Actual behavior

No contact request (gray banner in the contact list)
In “three dot menu ->contact requests” I can see this message.

Steps to reproduce the problem

  1. Receive a mail sendet from a regular mail client (unknown sender).
  2. Open DC.
  3. See, there is no contact request popping up.

the following messages pop up as contact requests directly in the chatlist:

  • messages sent from other DeltaChat apps

only if you’ve configured DeltaChat to show also normal e-mails:

  • e-mails from known senders

(i am thinking if it wouldn’t be better to strike the “known senders” above. it was originally to skip spam, however, as we have the “email interaction” options in 0.200 now, we can maybe mitigate this barrier as the default is already very restrictive)

Sorry,
I believe I don’t understand your reply.

Is my described behaviour the wished behaviour (no contact request from normal mail clients) by set “show all messages”?

Or is it a bug?

as long as it pop ups in the “contact requests view” accessible through the menu, it’s what is currently expected.

Thank you, now I got it :+1:

And it’s a good solution to separate regular mail from chats.

just that if users set emails interactions to “all” is because they want normal email to be treated as Delta Chat messages (to be compatible) and show contact requests in the chat list, since the “contact request view” is not easily visible in the chat list, users currently lost a lot of contact requests, some don’t even know this “contact request view” exists until I told them when they come saying “hey!!! delta chat doesn’t work, someone send me a message and I didn’t received it in Delta Chat”
I think there is a need to Make Contact Requests more visible

@r10s IMHO the “from known contacts” is still an important distinction for things popping up in the chat list (confirmation question, or (“tentative”) chats), for avoiding to suffer from spam. (And quite genius in conjunction with auto-detecting email-approved (sent-to) addresses.) Not only for those deltachat users that enable displaying of regular emails, but also for all using the new default “only chat” mode. Because, even without talking about that some attempt may probably happen anyway at some point, the mere existence of this default should lower the likelihood (interest) of spammers to add the Chat-Version header to their spam.

If you check the use-case wiki page, it distinguishes between email and chat messages. Emails are proposed to get listed in the “incoming emails” view without (audio) notifications, by default. (Your idea to have an envelope button to open the “incoming emails”, together with an “unseen emails” counter, has not been added there, but I like it more than my own mock up.)

The idea behind the distinction is that only chat messages (and email replies to chats) may be disturbing “push” messages, by default, classic emails would need to be able to be checked for by the user on their own schedule (by default or at least if configured so).

yes, but my proposal do not disturb, it is a silent counter so at least users know what is going on, honestly I don’t think hiding the contact request in the menu does any good, it is to annoying having to go there to check (when you realize or remember that this view exists)
I don’t see how it is good that Delta Chat download thousands of(probably unwanted) emails silently filing my storage and costing money(paid network) and while the server storage get full, I think users prefer to be aware of this, so they can take action(ex. block the unwanted contact, spam filtering, etc.)
I don’t use to receive spam, practically all emails on contact request view I had received were wanted emails, and when it was spam, Delta Chat only made me more miserable, since it was downloaded anyway.
My point is: ignoring something doesn’t make it disappear and actually can be worst, it is worst to lose an important message.

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I’m wondering, your response only lists things we agree upon. (Making incoming emails visible, not downloading messages from unknown contacts by default.)

Sure, the counter won’t disturb. I commented only because I thought that you wanted to show new emails in the chat list in the same way as chat messages.

I have nothing against this, it a nice thing if there is not much spam. Opening all emails as chats is one of the use-cases. I’m just saying that the distinction is still necessary for the other use-case (enabled by default) that treats emails differently (silent by default, and hopefully having a visible button with an “unseen” counter in the future).

PS: Is “only download messages from known contacts” already a filed option request?

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sorry if I confused you, hehehe, I(and other people also complain about this since it looks like a misbehaviour sometime working and some time it doesn’t) just desperately need a way to be aware of contact request from classic MUA, I would like to Make Contact Requests more visible but if that is too hard to do, I would

or whatever you can come up to solve this issue of missing contact request, in the beginning the common scenario is: an user installs Delta Chat and all his friends use they classic MUA, compatibility is important.

Regards,
adb :slight_smile:

Hi @adbenitez
If you would believe me it’s not a mail client, it’s a messenger based on SMTP, you would see, this behaviour ist perect :wink:

Ok, now I understand you have different preferences for the alternatives.
I think only the counter button would be a proper solution.
Unfortunately, the devs had removed the old way last year, before a better solution is in place.

It’s obvious that many users need a way to notice new incoming emails from un-known senders. Whithout allowing every such email to disrupt the user!

I would even prefer not to be interrupted (notified) by (longer) classic emails from known contacts, and think that there should be a better default to handle chats and emails separately (i.e. @r10s, no pop-ups for emails from known contacts, if the user merely configures to have classic emails displayed in a separate list), just list the (longer) classic emails from known contacts silently, as icons within corresponding chats (if existing) and provide that “new email counter button” in the main view to see them all:

And once again, all the options required to solve these use-case problems have been in the wiki for long:

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hahaha, I still think it is just an email client from the future :wink:
and being backguard compatible with the “old software” is important, specially when that “old software” is more used than DC right now

Absolutely. However, the newly introduced default setting “Show emails: No” (https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/pull/742) currently breaks the backwards compatibility with the email world for all new installations.

In the past it was still possible to reply to emails from your contacts that don’t have deltachat installed. Even if it was really cumbersome, and needed improvement: One had to find the “contact request” activity and manually monitor the INBOX.

But now, the new default kind of moves deltachat users into their own silo group, because they are not reachable anymore by their known contacts if these send a short email.

The “Start a chat?” prompting could instead default to only appear for reasonably short emails. This would not require the introduction of a “Show emails?” option, and not break the backwards compatibility with the default to ignore all classic emails.

Setting “Show emails: All” is not an alternative either, because it leads to a “Start chat?” prompting marathon for each and every email. Even once this gets fixed:

(For planning and checking consistency: Use-cases, chat rules and configuration options)

had to say I may even consider wise to set “all” as the default email interaction setting, but I don’t like your idea of short messages to determine chats, at all, sorry :frowning:

A default to only show short messages would make it easy to catch short pings, without creating too much noise after configuring an existing email account (while still allowing the user to manually check the full email view for all longer emails, anytime, or to disable the displaying of short emails alltogether). It’s a new mode to the existing options. I consider it as default because it should combine a lower noise level with classic email reachability for really short emails.

If you want to see more or less messages, there are actually considerable other options in the wiki draft.
The current “show emails: no” combines ignoring all emails with wiki option 2.1) Prompt/open tentative chat for all email-chat compliant messages. (Which will need to get separated as soon as spammers use Email-chat.)

Don’t you find the current prompting for “All” tedious? I think manually scrolling through a long list and having an overview is better than getting one prompt after the other.

If you would really want to see every email in deltachat, the wiki suggests to have separate (tentative) chats opened for each email (from [Wiki] Use-cases, chat rules and configuration options):

Chat Approval Mode: “Blacklisting – You may only block individual known contacts, and still see spam.

  • Enable 2.0) “open chat for all messages”. Also allows creating sender specific blacklisting rules.
  • Disable 1) “browse-able New (incoming) Emails” (no need, chats open automatically)

If you only want to see all emails from known contacts (current “Show emails: All”) you may set these two options with:

Chat Approval Mode: “Default – Your email usage automatically approves chat contacts.

I believe you :slight_smile: , when you can select
“Listen for chat-starting messages from? → Nobody (only manually started chats)”
which means:
Chat Approval Mode: “Whitelisting – Strictly manual addition of chat partners.”

  • Disables 2.1) Prompt/open tentative chat for all email-chat compliant messages .
  • Disables the scanning of messages on IMAP server for newly approved email receivers (MsgSCAN).

(from Use-cases, chat rules and configuration options)

Contact requests view needs some love, I think it is bad as it currently is shown, all messages are there in a mess, imagine if I have a wanted email/contact-request and 1000s of emails unwanted, it will be hard to find the wanted contact request, so what about this:

Lets display contact request more like in social networks, users expect a contact request view to be a list of persons/addresses to be accepted, I think will be better to show the contact requests grouped by contact, something like similar to the chat list, the user can approve them or look into this unapproved chats or swipe them out to delete them or block them, etc.

Sounds like a view for “unapproved contacts”. (May be a separate thing than “Incoming Emails”, but could also be useful, I think.)

If you still don’t feel like liking a default where only short emails (no chat-replies) trigger a “Start chat?” prompt, could please you post any disadvantage you see? (Besides, “you not liking it” and “you having to enable ‘Start chat?’ prompts for full length emails”, of course. :wink: )