Hi everyone, I have a question about the privacy of the Sender. Let’s take an imaginary situation: There exists a totalitarian regime-driven country that opreses all channels of communication. Somehow, it finds your Delta Account contact and that you have used relay XYZ. This country issues a co…

Governments (and cooperating foreign intelligence) can always gag order the host to enable full logging. They can stream the logs live to an external collection site - no need to store it on disk either. The data center and ISP of the server can log all connections and can correlate incoming and ou…

Unfortunately Ian is right. Even if the relay owner does not normally store the IP address, the court can force it to secretly start logging the IP address and you won’t know until it is too late. This is what happened when Swiss courts forced Proton Mail to start logging the IP address of a climate…

Right. One more aspect of enabling multi-device mode is that it might facilitate in someone installing further devices to easily listen-in on all your conversations without you noticing (such as when you left one of your devices unattended and they scan a QR). We have lots of topics about this, let …

Hi @ian and @peppa , It is always interesting to read this kind of discussions. I was also wondering about this scenario… If I am located and I operate in country XYZ, but in my DC app I use a chatmail/relay located in another country/continent YBC. For whatever reason, my XYZ’s government doesn’…

Yes, it would be smooth. [image] Five Eyes | Other international cooperatives Beginning with its founding by the United States and United Kingdom in 1946, the alliance expanded twice, inducting Canada in 1948 and Australia and New Zealand in 1956, establishing the Five Eyes as it is today.…

By the way, the jurisdiction of the building that houses the chatmail server that you see in the chart is only one part of the equation. If multiple people or legal entities have either physical or remote access to the server, they can force any one of them to either backdoor it, give them a data d…

All these things Ian is bringing up makes me think that SimpleX Chat is probably safer, even if a government can ban the whole protocol (which is dubious because SimpleX also has packet obfuscation to make the traffic look like normal HTTP). But since developers still believe in Delta Chat, there m…

HTTP transport between servers has just been released in chatmail 1.11.0: [image] Release deliver messages via HTTPS (filtermail-transport) · chatmail/relay Summary: Introduce filtermail-transport for delivering messages via HTTPS (SMTP stays as fallback) Introduce experimental docker i…

I am going to qualify what Ian said. If a country has decent privacy protections, getting access to data requires a warrant, which requires presenting evidence to a court which may well not trust an authoritarian country. The old remailers onion-routed mail through multiple countries (which you coul…

[image] ian: such as when you left one of your devices unattended and they scan a QR On my phone at least, it makes me input my pin before showing the Add Device QR, so even if I left it unlocked they could only add devices if they know my pin. Not sure if it asks for root to do it on linux b…

Security concern: Does relay store the IP or details of the sender?

Chatmail Relays

ian May 16, 2026, 8:48am 9

HTTP transport between servers has just been released in chatmail 1.11.0:

On the client side, JMAP would also improve the situation of blending in later on: