Hi there,
Could anyone teach me what is “DeltaChat: connected” in Connectivity and why I have to connect to this server? If I can’t connect to it, what consequences will I bear?
Many thanks.
Delta Chat (the application) maintains two connections to your email server: one connection is to monitor Inbox folder, and another connection is to monitor DeltaChat folder. Inbox connection is needed to quickly detect messages that arrive from the outside. After that, Delta Chat moves messages to DeltaChat folder and then when it detects that the message has been moved, it downloads the message from the DeltaChat folder.
Connectivity status displays the status of these two connections, both are between you and your email server.
The reason why messages are not simply downloaded from the Inbox is that it’s possible that user has multiple devices. If the first device moves incoming message to DeltaChat folder first, the other device has to download it from DeltaChat folder, so for simplicity Delta Chat always downloads messages from the DeltaChat folder.
If you don’t use DeltaChat folder (this can be disabled in the settings) and keep messages in the Inbox, then you only need a single connection.
There is no special Delta Chat server, Delta Chat has no dedicated servers and only connects to your email server. The only exceptions are the Thunderbird provider database looked up sometimes during initial configuration, Mapbox tile servers used to download the map if you enable experimental location streaming feature and open the map inside the application, and DNS servers used to resolve your email server domain name into IP address.
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@404 I would like to underline one thing in the excellent explanation by link2xt.
“Delta Chat (the application) maintains two connections to your email server:”
Your email server.
Delta Chat has no server of its own!
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For completeness: also the notification heartbeat server for iOS, but its dumb and has not more data than it needs (device-token that should be pinged)
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Dear link2xt,
Thanks for your detailed answer! You have my respect.
In application, the “DeltaChat” shows in Connectivity means whether my device connects to the email server that monitoring Inbox folder, and if I disabled “Automatic Moves to DeltaChat Folder” in setting, “DeltaChat” just disappeared in Connectivity and I still could use it to receive message properly, in the meantime, the connection from my device to the email server reduce from 2 to 1, am I right?
If I don’t get it wrong, there’s another question. I found sometime connect to INBOX just working fine, but connect to DeltaChat shows between “connecting…” and “connected” for a long time and I can’t receive message from others, but send message works fine. First I thought it maybe because connects to “DeltaChat Server” was blocked by my ISP, but now I know there’s no “DeltaChat Server”, it all just connect to the email server, so I wonder it’s a bug? BTW, I use outlook for your reference.
It could be that your email provider is unhappy with multiple connections or has a strict connection limit, as a result the second connection fails. There is a log available in all applications, on mobile it’s in the settings and on desktop it’s in the menu at the top, you can try to look into it when this happens, maybe there is a more detailed error logged, could even be that the server explicitly tells that the connection limit is reached.
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Dear link2xt,
That’s very kind of you, you really help me a lot. I will try to check error log to find the reason or just turn move to DeltaChat folder off and see what will happens.
Thanks again.