OpenKeychain integration

[gessel]

@link2xt

Having a single key that you use for everything and copying it to all devices is not necessarily the most secure way to manage your keys. An alternative is to let Delta Chat create a “chat key” and then publish a certification using your “root key” to say that you also have this “chat key”. This way you can manage your “root key” in OpenKeychain or better on a non-mobile device.

Sure, that’s one way of doing it. I’d rather use my primary key so people can look it up on a key server or by WKD by my email address, the same address associated with my delta chat ID, and verify by reference that it is most likely my key. I understand that is A use modality, not THE use modality.

@link2xt

@gessel

It is unfortunate that the 17% of users that value a desirable logo over utility so cripple security for the other 83% of us.

Don’t know what you are talking about here.

oh just being snarky about iOS users, a tiny minority in the global scale with outsize influence on the development of tools. iOS users make me sad.

@link2xt

Most Delta Chat users are not people who manage their own email server. I don’t even think it was ever the case.

It isn’t meaningfully “decentralized” if you expect users to default to Gmail or the default mail provider. It is decentralized and secure when I can use my IMAP server on my hardware sitting in my premises. Delta Chat makes that easy, much easier than running your own Signal server anyway, and that’s really awesome and something I’ve wanted since the mid 00’s. Plus I really like that the chat is accessible in my primary mail store and gets all the cool bonus utility that comes with that standard and standards compliance while still being useful as a typical low-friction, low intellectual effort communication modality. It is great that, assuming my use concept is doable, that even when Delta Chat goes the way of Yahoo Messenger, my messages will still be accessible to me, even 30 years from now, because they’re in my IMAP store encrypted with my public key that’s on my keyring.

@link2xt

Delta Chat deletes messages from the server if you enable the setting to delete messages from the server (delete_server_after internally). If you enable the setting and Delta Chat displays the message, it may delete it. There are of course corner cases if you manage to confuse Delta Chat with virtual folders or create a new folder with the same UIDVALIDITY, but I’m not aware of any bugs that may have caused deletion of wrong messages, nobody reported anything similar.

Delta Chat was deleting non-DC messages

Delta Chat version 1.28.1 Expected behavior No messages deleted at all, not sure why any would be. Actual behavior systematic deletion of certain emails - not random, not all but I’m not sure what the selection criterion were. DC would delete a daily system summary email in my inbox, delete zabbix trouble reports on a similar topic from a another folder, delete all the camera generated alerts (via a different sendmail host) from a third. Note this was not a “move” operation, it was a “del…

Delta Chat should never, ever, ever, ever delete a message off the server without per message, explicit consent. Ever. Like EVER. No. Bad app. If that isn’t an absolute, unchangeable, fundamental philosophy, nobody should connect delta chat to their archival mail store (which is for most of us, our only mail store, though that may well be our personal issue and inconsistent with Delta Chat’s intended use). That’s a literally catastrophic failure.

I do appreciate the candor in the continuing cavalier embrace of “corner cases” that could confuse the app and result in silent, irreversible destruction of critical data. I would suggest being clear about that as a design decision so that people might take more care than I did in 2022 in connecting Delta Chat to my primary mail store.

BTW, I think I managed to recover all the messages Delta Chat deleted, but I’ll never be 100% sure.