Selling Chatmail to businesses

[Low]

Has anyone tried selling chatmail setup and management to a business?

They pay a LOT for Google email accounts for people. Also for Slack. Sometimes both lol.

Since chatmail is dirt cheap, seems like a no brainer. Could easily be on their domain too.

Downsides would be people also want a normal email experience at the same time. Have it look normal to their clients and customers. And most external people wouldn’t be using encryption. So this likely would only be for internal chat.

And they also like that gmail is bundled with drive and docs and sheets.

[WofWca]

This post talks about business deployments, but IDK if it’s about “selling”: Auto create account on desktop client start.
There is also this fork of Delta Chat Privitty · GitHub (and a forum post about it 'Privitty' DC fork). Seems very corporate to me.
I’ve also heard of another case in Germany but I don’t remember the details.

[ian]

Related:

Paid Servers: The economics of running a chatmail server

This never worked so far in the past, but maybe you have some secret sauce that you did not explain above. There existed FOSS service providers in times with much stronger economy, with much less global disturbances, originating from a wealthy country where members are supposed to be able to afford anything, offering a wide palette of services including email, expensive chat platforms, storage, website, shells and more, all they requested is a minimum donation of $1/year and even that was pos…

[Low]

@ian

Related:

That’s not related because what you’re describing is Business-to-Consumer (B2C). I’m talking about Business-to-Business (B2B).

[Low]

@WofWca

This post talks about business deployments, but IDK if it’s about “selling”: Auto create account on desktop client start.

Yeah that sounds like the in-house tech team wants to spin up a chatmail instance for the small business. Really good use case! Theoretically, Chatmail would be easy enough that most businesses could do it in-house. But I would guess that many would prefer some external people to manage it similar to how businesses pay for Slack.

@WofWca

There is also this fork of Delta Chat Privitty · GitHub (and a forum post about it ‘Privitty’ DC fork). Seems very corporate to me.
I’ve also heard of another case in Germany but I don’t remember the details.

Interesting… I think the ideal Delta Chat fork would allow for both unencrypted and encrypted mail. That way you could send and receive regular mail from external businesses / clients and also speak securely internally. I think the app could simply have Mail and Chat tabs for this.

But I think chatmail recently disallowed all unencrypted traffic, which would ruin that functionality.

[795c8f62u]

@Low

But I think chatmail recently disallowed all unencrypted traffic, which would ruin that functionality.

The company can probably configure the chatmail server to allow unencrypted messages, but this may cause UX issues on the client side. Instead, I think it might be necessary to have separate classic email address and chatmail address.

However, there are some other issues:

• Delta Chat is really designed as a chat application, its email support is not great
• One of the reasons chatmail server is so easy to deploy and has so little resource use is because it does not need to handle unencrypted spam, and encrypted spam is currently too difficult for the spammers to attempt
• An important thing for enterprise applications is that they need to integrate with the company’s SSO (single sign on) and employee directory (usually Active Directory), you will need to implement those