Hi, i have some questions about Deltachat+Bots ( this particular case RSS bots ) and about infra to run bots and stats in general… Im a osm[1] mapper and want to find a better workflow to monitor changesets.
Actually i use Telegram with some RSS bot and is pretty great BUT its a thing of freedom… I want to use free software to do the same thing and i see Deltachat could be game changing here.
Openstreetmap have some feeds to keep track about multiple services[2] and the result is the next image ( RSS feed from one of them )… Maybe in the future should be possible some deltachat bot that talk directly to the OSM API
I installed Deltachat Desktop and use “feedsbot@hispanilandia.net” to emulate the same… Boom! works like i want ( maybe a little slower to get the message vs Telegram ). So this are my questions:
I want to confirm the option to create a group/channel and have the same rss bot send changeset notifications to multiple people ( i think its possible but i have to test that ). This can help to monitor cities, states, countrys, etc to improve QA on map.
If i understand right i need two things, a server for deltachat bot and a mail-server / mailbox ( can be the same or can be separate )… I see you use mail-in-a-box, any advice for this? Why this in particular? Any other tested mail-servers?
What are the numbers of sent emails for public bots? bandwidth? ( How many hourly… So i can check about limits of external providers )
Time to retrieve RSS feed is configurable?
I see public bots have instances on “testrun.org” / “hispanilandia.net” / “buzon.uy” / “systemli.org” … Shared/VPS/Dedicated servers? Where are these located ( country )?
Any other info that you consider important about infra would help.
Im gonna write an article on osm blog to show this alternative to Telegram, when i complete all tests and get the big picture of workflow ( yeah for sure on spanish because is my main language ).
I wish I could help … you are asking many of the same questions I am.
I think mail-in-a-box is being used because its a really easy to deploy mailserver that can be installed on any VPS.
I’m playing with tgbridgebot@hispanilandia.net to bridge telegram with Delta and it also works good except the bot is in Spanish. It does have limitations on number of emails but I’m not sure if that is a limitation on telegram or baked in by the person hosting the server. I use Yunohost (this would be in place of mail-in-a-box) for my personal files so I expect to be able to use this as my email server, but still experimenting.
If you get anywhere with your project, please document it as there is very little on instruction here. I will do the same.
yes, mailserver and bot can be on completely different machines, also the bot can run anywhere no port forwarding required.
If you are not against using docker I would recommend https://mailcow.email otherwise any email server would do, should not have strange limits or too aggressive spam filters and a few basic IMAP extensions: IDLE, CONDSTORE, QUOTA (quota is not required)
testrun.org was normal/manual postfix/dovecot, now it is running mailcow.
Generally I would say just try it out, most servers should work as long as they follow the email standards (IMAP and SMTP, autoconfig.xml if you have non standard ports and want to skip advanced setup.)
@adbenitez has some statistics about his bots, but depends on how many people would use the OSM feed thing you’re offering.
testrun.org - test server for the deltachat devs, there are plans to turn it into a “real” provider with limited accounts to test deltachat out. currently hosted by the server cow folks (the people behind mailcow)
hispanilandia.net and buzon.uy - I don’t know, probably hosted in a Spanish/Portuguese speaking country? again @adbenitez can tell you more
systemli.org - invite only, leftist collective, probably hosted in Germany (friendly project, they allowed us to offer DC users to use their jitsi instance as one of the default video chat options)
The biggest userbase of deltachat bots is in Cuba currently, so the provider choice is also about what providers work good in Cuba (not being blocked)
Generally delta-chat focuses more on the email client, delta-chat does not have own servers (except for the notification relay, which is currently a heartbeat server pinging iOS devices, so that deltachat can wake up from the background to ask your mailserver for updates, maybe we’ll need that for the android version too in the future see https://dontkillmyapp.com)
Hi, very helpful information!! Thanks @Axe and @Simon… Actually i’m trying to configure simplebot + simplebot_feeds ( pip install git+https://github.com/simplebot-org/simplebot_feeds ) on shared hosting ( DirectAdmin + Python… Should work on cPanel too ), and first test with echo plugin was positive:
By default “Aplication startup file” is a passenger_wsgi.py file ( maybe i need to change this for app.py?.. I don’t know anything about python but i’m open to learn )… The easy way for me is deploy on VPS mailserver+bot, but if i can run this on shared hosting other people could follow to use this install metod
my public feeds bot sent 20677 in 7 days last week, I don’t track bandwidth usage but that depends on the bot, an RSS bot has low bandwidth usage since it fetches only some XMLs from time to time, while a browsing and file downloader bot will use more bandwidth but it all depends on usage, I don’t think it is relevant unless your bot have a lot of users and your VPS has some low internet quota ex. n GB of traffic per month.
you don’t need your own email server to setup delta chat bots, people setup bots even with gmail accounts, but of course if you have your own email server that makes your life a lot easier to have all the accounts you want with the names/addresses you want and without the anti-spam limits of some providers (which are not an issue if it is a bot for personal usage or for an small group of friends)
since most Cubans don’t have hosting, what they do to host their own bot is to use Heroku, for example I created this project to setup with one click! a browsing, downloads, uploads, translations and memes bot (multi-use bot):
