Push notifications under total censorship on regular email

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Hello everyone!

Currently, we are facing significant censorship in Russia; often, the only things that work reliably are state-monitored messengers or local email services. I’ve decided to use Mail.ru as the transport layer for Delta Chat. However, push notifications are delayed by up to 30 minutes.

Since using specialized mail servers with proper PUSH support isn’t an option right now, I’m planning to run a local script/program on my home computer. The idea is to maintain a persistent connection with my family’s email accounts and, as soon as a new message is detected, trigger a push notification to their iPhones or Android devices. Fortunately, APNs and Firebase (FCM) still seem to work fine here.

Are there any existing open-source projects for this, or could you point me toward documentation on how to manually trigger a push notification to a device running Delta Chat?

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The problem with mail.ru is not that it does not support push notifications: it does not even support IMAP IDLE so the only way to check for new messages over IMAP is constantly polling.

Anyway, if you already do polling from a custom script, you can trigger push notification by doing curl -X POST https://notifications.delta.chat/notify -d <token-goes-here>. You can see your token in the log of the application, it rarely changes.

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curl -X POST https://notifications.delta.chat/notify -d <token-goes-here>

Phones (iPhones) do not respond to a curl call from a computer at all. Moreover, both computer and phones are now connected to the free Internet.Is the token taken from the logs in the notify-token column?

Also, notifications.delta.chat can either answer 200 or 410 or 500 - whenever it wants.

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