It is possible to emulate the behaviour of other IM apps/protocols, like riot, or XMPP, that make possible to know when the other user is typing, Delta Chat could send emails similar to read receipts but for typing statuses.
If user A closes Delta Chat and user B send a message to A, when user A opens Delta Chat again, the typing status message is deleted silently since there are a more recent message from B, in general all status messages are deleted silently if there are a message with a more resent date.
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This would cause even more mails than right now, maybe double or triple them. Also there are latency and message order issues. There are some folks who are working imap extensions to signal presence. Personally, i don’t think isignalling presence is important enough to think too hard about it 
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Yeah! I don’t really want to use this feature, actually you know I would like to minimize the actual traffic, but for people with unmetered/fast connections, this feature would make people to feel more like in an IM app, and to be honest this isn’t my idea, there are already chatting apps that use email (just like DeltaChat) that have this feature.
Also I don’t think presence is important enough but sadly most “normal” users, that are used to the apps DeltaChat wants to replace, do.
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let’s put it on what is often called the “back burner” … so for reconsideration at some later time. if about real-time then i think eg webrtc audio calls could be more interesting.
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I love presence. Hazahh
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Hello,
I know I am probably bumping this issue years after, but having the typing feature would be really nice. I’ve been trying to have real time conversation with someone, and it’s a bit strange to not know whether they are typing or not.
On the whole I think I prefer not to have a typing indicator; it seems a bit invasive. It also pushes people to type immediately instead of thinking first, for fear they should be seen as ignoring someone.
The extra traffic also seems wasteful, and it seems like it would increase risks of traffic analysis.
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It probably depends on the use case. I was chatting with a relative, it would have been nice to know when they were typing so that I could wait for them to send their answer without sending another message. In that way, typing indicators make conversations more fluid.
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Perhaps a typing and online indicator would be best implemented using the real-time channels? As I understand it, the servers are only needed to establish a connection. Afterwards, all data is sent peer-to-peer. This would put less strain on the servers than using email for this purpose.
Furthermore, the real-time channels cannot be disabled in the future anyway. However, it would be desirable for users to be able to specify which users can see the online and typing status, since the IP address is also transmitted in this process.
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