Right 
I’m suggesting keeping the rest like it is now, so no contact requests. To start a new chat and get notifications/show mails in DeltaChat the mail address/contact needs to be inserted manually.
That option would not be suitable for me, because I would be forced to open the contact request view regularly to see if someone new tried to get in touch with me. A toast, e.g. “A new contact request has been received!” should pop up at least to inform the user. Otherwise nobody knows to check for contact requests manually, especially those who have not used a messenger before.
This can be done already, although it will not be used very much, because Delta Chat can access the contacts saved in the operating system (if the app has been granted access to).
Of course a lot of things can be done to make your experience better. But with almost all suggestions there are people who like the current behaviour better for some reason and it brings complexities with it, also with the development and implenetation of the suggestions/change.
That’s why I am for my minimal solution first. I can’t see any downsides to it and it’s a very small change. You personally might not find it useful, but it won’t make anything worse either. For me and possibly others it would be a useful change.
But it can’t be done already. If the setting is changed to “All” the “contact requests” view will contain all mails like I’d like to, however DeltaChat shows a list of all new contact requests as well at the top of the conversation. I don’t want that. I do want the list of all mails in the “contact requests” view however, which currently serves no purpose if the setting is “For accepted contacts”.
But it is always better to get more information than less or even none.
See? So much for the user experience. 
Your experience != (general) user experience 
That is a general assumption neither you nor I can claim.
No, that’s just a fact.
However what you probably mean is that most or all users would agree to you. This is complex though and that’s one of the reasons why I want my suggestion to be minimal so that most or all people agree and it also takes very little coding effort.
We can have different opinions about what can be good (or bad), and listening to each other is important. After all, it does not matter whether you like my proposal or not. (I do not like yours, too, BTW.) You are just another user like so many others, so please do not play the judge for all users.
If you want to contribute to the topic, do it here. And if you long for getting personal, do it in a private message. Thanks.
I was just saying no single person’s experience is the same as the experience of everyone. Since you said I should not play the judge for all users you seem to agree.
No, you said:
It can be understood this way: “gerryfrancis has a different user experience than other users.”
But your last statement reads like: “gerryfrancis has a different user experience than many users.” While I believe that is not true either, I can live with it way better.
Every one user will not have the same experience than all other users. If that were the case then all users would have the same user experience which is pretty much impossible.
I didn’t read all of this topic, but skimming it looks like you first talked cross-purposes and the last ~10 messages are a full on meta discussion that looks like it could end up in a fight.
So I suggest we do an audio/video call to resolve this.
I’ll send you a DM-Group message to organize it. @gerryfrancis and @Lexi.
| Option | contact requests | Messages |
|---|---|---|
| Chat only | dc messages from unknown contacts | all dc messages from accepted contacts/groups |
| Email only from accepted contacts | dc messages from unknown contacts | also show email messages that come from accepted contacts/groups |
| All Emails | dc messages and emails from unknown contacts | messages (chat or email from accepted contacts/groups |
show_emails= DC_SHOW_EMAILS_OFF (0)= show direct replies to chats only (default), DC_SHOW_EMAILS_ACCEPTED_CONTACTS (1)= also show all mails of confirmed contacts, DC_SHOW_EMAILS_ALL (2)= also show mails of unconfirmed contacts in the deaddrop.
Delta Chat Core C Interface: dc_context_t Class Reference
not all emails are dowloaded by DeltaChat, this setting only applies to new emails,
It does not download old emails to put them into the contact request view retroactively.
Hi Simon, thanks for the useful table, information is easy to grasp that way. So I edited it in the way I’d like DeltaChat to work instead:
| Option | contact requests | Messages |
|---|---|---|
| Chat only | dc messages from unknown contacts | all dc messages from accepted contacts/groups |
| Email only from accepted contacts | dc messages and emails from unknown contacts | also show email messages that come from accepted contacts/groups |
| All Emails | dc messages and emails from unknown contacts | messages (chat or email from accepted contacts/groups |
With the change in bold letters.
Do you think that would be confusing or is it a sensible suggestion? (Or alternatively show a button to load the last few “dc messages and emails from unknown contacts”. Because right now if I take a look at my regular email inbox and see an email by someone I’d like to reply with DeltaChat to I have to get the mail address and make a new conversation in DeltaChat. Just selecting the mail from a list would be more convenient, faster and easier.
Thanks for reading and contributing to software freedom!
You can propose a new setting that fits your use-case, but I disagree with changing the existing one.
Also I think the option for your use-case needs to do another thing: don’t show the chatlistitem/banner for the last contactrequest.
Also a prerequisite to this is a redesign of the contact request view, because it will be really confusing with all messages from all your email in the current chat format.
Also this needs to have a warning about increased data usage, because all messages will be downloaded in this case.
That sounds rather complicated, I’m not sure whether the core developers want to implement that.
Hi Simon, thanks for your reply.
Because of the reasons detailed in your last message? Or anything else in addition?
I already wanted that, yeah. I was only talking about the contact requests view, not about the chatlistitem/banner in the conversations/chats list. But I guess that needs extra development work, because right now it’s not independently implemented?
Isn’t that already the case if the setting is set to “All”?
Hmm I thought the functionality/code is already there for the “All” setting, is that not correct?
Because I don’t like the idea of changing what a mode does that the user had selected, I already see complaints about increased data usage.
Yes its the same system underneath, so this would need adjustment. We should upgrade the whole contact request thing in general, also because it gets really messy with many messages and it sometimes shows weird info message ("X left/joined the group"s of chats you deleted, or split groups for example).
For the contactRequestChatListItem there is already an proposal for an alternative way to indicate new contact requests to the user: (see especially the image in the first post) Make Contact Requests more visible
the “redesign”/ux improvement is necessary there as well as described above.
In this case the user chooses all and so its not surprising when all messages are downloaded.
I don’t know the exact logic of when contact requests are downloaded, but I think they are handled like other messages, only that they are stored in the “deaddrop/contactrequest”-pseudo-chat.
I believe we should think about how we can improve this, maybe create the chats (give them some kind of deadrop attribute) so that the contact requests could be chats instead of messages.
But its also important to look whether a mini change could already bring an improvement, so a recent suggestion (I believe I heard it from @r10s) was to only show the last message of a contact request person/thread/chat) that would already clean up the contact request chat a fair bit.
I don’t do much core development currently so I don’t know the exact inner workings in this area.
Also we’re touching too much topics at the same time so lets identify them and split them up into their own smaller feature proposals.
2 Likes
Hi @Lexi, did I get it wrong or what you propose is the same as “all emails”, how could you get email contact requests from unknown contacts if the setting is called “Email only from accepted contacts”??? 
that setting do exactly what it is expected, you will never get a contact request from an accepted contact. The contact request view has the same use as for “chat only” in this situation.
Best regards,
adb
Thanks Simon, my suggestion does have too many drawbacks after all that I now know about because you explained them. You also said work is already done to improve contact requests, so I’ll see what comes out of it. Maybe it’s possible to just download a list of addresses that sent mails instead of the mail to save data? Just an idea I’m putting out there, no discussion needed
adbenitez, my idea was to not get contact requests that show up at the top of the conversations list but instead only get them in the contact requests view. Since I never got any requests with the “Email only from accepted contacts” setting, I assumed it was an oversight that no mails showed up in the “contact requests” view. I thought a request is a request independent from the setting and the setting only applied to the contact requests that pop up at the top of the conversations list. Maybe this is something that would be cool to improve as well in the future.