Subject of emails

Muchas Gracias, I didn’t know that SMS supports subjects.

So, there actually is prior art for traditional subject support in a chat app. :slight_smile: And there is the possibility to optimize it to support email lists by showing the current top-subject only in the header, and provide a top-subject message filter (as pcrockett imagined above).

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Not sure if anyone already mentioned this here, but Spike has addressed a similar issue already. Every time a user tries to compose a message, a pop-up appears with the current Email Subject, and you can either delete it or change it. A similar thing could be done here. Screenshot below:

image

Delta chat says, it has the widest community as it uses the traditional e-mail standard. I think this is only true if it is compatible to email and this means e-mail subjects need to be changeable. In my opinion this is highly important. I really don’t want to send my boss e-mails which start with “Chat:…” or “Group:…”

There have been some ideas how to manage this. For me, even a simple menu entry would make it. After changing the current subject, all following messages will be send with this subject.

I really love delta chat. Please think about implementing functionality like this.

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DeltaChat is awesome, and it would be great to be able to configure the subject header!

The correct answer here is both of them.

  1. DC’s biggest feature is having no damn subject line. This is the main UX difference between “mail” and “chat”.
  2. But! Most DC users are using the application to talk with normies on traditional mail clients. And some DC users are always going to want more control over the result.

So surely the way forward is:

  1. Keep the Chat: ... feature as default behavior. Try to create a new standard. One day everyone may understand that Chat: ... means a message was sent with a simplified chat app, just as they understand what Re: ... and Fwd: ... mean.
  2. Provide a discreet opt-in setting for users who absolutely must edit their subject line.

Done.

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we’ve just merged a pull-requests that targets the subject-things discussed here in this thread - thanks @all for contributing!) -

changes at a glance:

  • in group-chats, the subject is set to the group-name
  • the subject in one-to-one-chats is unchanged

it’s a simple rule now: group-name is the subject.

these changes allows Delta Chat users to send e-mails that look and behave like normal emails. the flow is nothing new: create group, set group-name, add members, send message.

a big advantage over extra controls or so (that i would really hate btw) is that the answers and subsequent messages get grouped together - in both, Delta Chat and in the traditional user agents. this won’t be easily the case when setting the subject per-message; things would probably just get more complex and harder to understand.

so, all in all, this does not change anything for pure Delta Chat users but offer a way to interact more nicely with traditional clients.

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Why not have the client use an X-Header and-not subject?

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not sure what you are meaning.

this thread is mainly about what is visible to other mail programs, some hidden X-Header won’t help on that.

@enacting

Did you mean to say “in lieu of subject header employ an X-header” ?

This seems the elegant solution as server and mail client can filter on this. DC would need UI for X-header management.

@enacting @Pleiades I don’t understand which problem you want to solve here. could you elaborate?

this thread is just a discussion how the subject should look like in traditional email clients.

Let re-phrase it:
It’s a security rule now: do not use groups at all if you care about secure communication, because of leak of unencrypted group’s names that disclose to email servers and those who is “in a middle” - purpose of group.

Why not to simply enable this “feature” ONLY for unencrypted messages only, if ALL members use unencrypted communication then turn “simple rule now: group-name is the subject.”, otherwise
this solution violate simplest cryptography rules.
There no any points to disclose group’s name to regular email clients that are unable to read internal encrypted content.
Imagine, how “happy” would be lawyers for example, who use groups “murders” or “terror” or “bombing” for grouping cases, or army guys, who use group “tactical locations”…

Anyway, I still can’t understand people who can’t understand simple thing: chat is NOT email.
Honestly, use spoon to eat soup instead of using fork for that.
DC doesn’t have full functionality of normal email client, so bothering people who doesn’t have DC from your favorite DeltaChat UI isn’t polite at first and second, in attempt to “seat on two different chairs” you damaging the whole point of “chat” meaning.

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this is simply not true. the subject is not sent unencrypted in encrypted mails. not in the past and not now.

and this was also pointed out already above.

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Im sorry, but I didn’t get it, what do you mean then under term of “normal emails” ?
Subject field have been always unencrypted, if you want to pick a group name and use it as part of Subject text to satisfy “normal email clients” to be able to see meaningful/human readable text(as well use email clients feature as grouping and so on), then it means group name will be exposed in plain text.

Im sorry upfront if I miss something…

Subject field have been always unencrypted

i think, this is the misunderstanding.
the assumption that Subjects are always unencrypted is just wrong.

there is a standard that encrypts the subject fields as well, the standard is used by Delta Chat since the first day, but it is also supported by eg. Enigmail. it was called “Memoryhole” in the beginning and renamed to “Protected Headers” later. The formal published version of the draft is hosted by the IETF.

so, whatever we write to the subject, it will be encrypted together with the mail body. btw. this is also true for other metadata.

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FYI, I’ve introduced a related topic at Threading is broken for recipients who read mail with GMail/Outlook webmail/maybe others . I didn’t want to thread-jack this one though; the new topic is very specifically about 1-to-1, whereas this has wound up being about groups.

Regards,
Richard

Congratulations, very good solution.
Haven’t tried but I guess this also allows having multiple “group-” (or rather subject-) chats at the same time with the same contact very nicely.

The question this raises now is, if this fusion of group and topic creation could now allow for some even more straight forward group/subject creation UI.

Throwing in some ideas:

  • Maybe a button to add a topic, i.e. converting an existing 1-to-1 chat into a group/subject?

  • A checkbox, or already a subject/group-text-entry box during chat creation? (Instead of the current separate “create group” step.)

  • A unified chat creation dialog with “add another contact” and “set/new subject” options?

  • The tap-on-the-title-bar options also allowing to change the subject topic, or start a new separate topic group with the same members?

Hi. I know this is ages old, but I have one more suggestion for this. I think subjects now work quite well and I have been able to switch to deltachat from other apps.

My suggestion is to be able to set/change the subject with markdown # syntax. Meaning, if the first line of a sent message begins with #, that line would become the new subject.

# This is my subject

This would streamline starting new conversations with people not using delta (and avoid creating useless 1-1 groups), while being completely unobtrusive considering the chat-nature of the app.

Just a thought. Thanks for the app!

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I opened another thread because I didn’t find this before.

I proposed these options, more user friendly:

This subject can be add by command (like /subject, #subject etc) or a button. I think it
s very important having a subject in email.

I have a very simple UI idea. I hope this gives people some direction. See for yourself:

This really just builds off of the prior decision— that the group title and the email subject should be one and the same. I like that idea. I just found a couple of instances where there needs to be something additional.

Firstly, we’re all likely aware of the case of one-to-one direct messages. For these messages, we do not want to change the group title. If we did, we would just have to remember which title corresponds to which contact, and the inbox would no longer list messages according to the names of the other parties. And yet, the default subject isn’t good. The default subject is even worse in my case, because my device is in the persian language, and DC translates the default subject. Because of this, when I email someone directly, they receive a message with subject «پیام ازAnastázius»… Yes, it is even missing a space, not to mention that most of my contacts don’t know how to read «پیام از». We have to be able to change the subject in direct messages without changing group title.

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