Status of AEAP and possible workarounds

[gardenerik]

Hello,

I noticed that AEAP was disabled some time ago, presumably temporarily, as seen here.

I was wondering if there are any plans for it to return in the near future. If not, is there a recommended workaround? For example, would it be possible to import existing messages into a new account, or something like that?

Thanks in advance!

[link2xt]

It is going to be reimplemented. Change WIP: PGP contacts by link2xt · Pull Request #6796 · chatmail/core · GitHub makes it possible to port 1:1 chats (which is not possible with existing AEAP implementation) and then there is a plan to allow doing AEAP by configuring an additional provider instead of reconfiguring the current one.

[bencan]

Great to hear you are working to improve this feature.

@link2xt

Change WIP: PGP contacts by link2xt · Pull Request #6796 · chatmail/core · GitHub makes it possible to port 1:1 chats (which is not possible with existing AEAP implementation)

I didn’t read about this limitation before. So the existing implementation won’t let you use AEAP if there is only one identity assigned to your email address? That seems like the majority of cases! Maybe I misunderstood what you meant here.

@link2xt

then there is a plan to allow doing AEAP by configuring an additional provider instead of reconfiguring the current one

Would this eventually lead to the possibility of cloning an account and keeping the old address active parallel to the newer one, to catch any messages still sent to the old address, as I described here? Or could this even be laying groundwork for multihoming in future?

[gardenerik]

@bencan

I didn’t read about this limitation before. So the existing implementation won’t let you use AEAP if there is only one identity assigned to your email address? That seems like the majority of cases! Maybe I misunderstood what you meant here.

I think @link2xt under “porting 1:1 chats” means that chats between two people will be properly handled after AEAP. I think the current implementation creates another chat in the app for your contacts, so they have “you before AEAP” and “you after AEAP” as separate chat histories.

[bencan]

I see, that makes sense. I got confused where the github PR mentions “1:1 chat assignment … multiple PGP-contacts with the same email address”.

I would not have guessed that this limitation with 1:1 chats existed just from reading the available posts about AEAP. At least I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere. I always imagine that the 1:1 chats are more simple to implement than the group chats, so my assumption was that if it was already working seamlessly for the group chats, it is also working seamlessly for the 1:1 chats!