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.
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:
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Maybe a button to add a topic, i.e. converting an existing 1-to-1 chat into a group/subject?
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A checkbox, or already a subject/group-text-entry box during chat creation? (Instead of the current separate “create group” step.)
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A unified chat creation dialog with “add another contact” and “set/new subject” options?
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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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that is hard to discover though and feels hacky and could cause undesired effects, I think a better approach is to allow to set subject by long-pressing the send button (that still have the issue of hard to discover, maybe show a tip dialog the first time the user press the send button)
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Please do not forget about accessibility. That is, to make it work when
using TalkBack or Jieshuo in Android, as well as with screen readers for
Linux and Windows (Orca, NVDA, etc.).
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Changing the subject, as well as attaching multiple files at one message, are two features that are absolutely needed. Like any IMAP client, somehow they must be implemented.
Please work towards this direction.
These are the only reason not to have delta chat in my oppinion, as this is a great idea otherwise!
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An e-mail subject is important to better communicate with non-DC users.
While I was thinking about this, I came up with a few ideas that I would like to discuss here.
Three questions need to be answered:
1.) How to integrate entering an email subject into the UI?
2.) How should the subject be displayed?
3.) Does a subject also make sense in chats with DC users?
1.)
I would place the subject function in the attachment menu.
Strictly speaking, a subject is of course not an attachment, but you could interpret it as “attaching” a subject to the message. This would leave the chat view unchanged and it would not be overloaded with additional icons.
After the menu item “Subject” had been selected, a second input line would be displayed.
It could be closed again with the X icon. By having the “X” on the left side, accidental sending of the message would be avoided. In addition, the path for the pointer or finger would be shorter.
Example images:
2.)
The subject could be italicized or bolded in or above the speech bubble to make it stand out from the message body. But the chat view would probably quickly appear more confusing and less tidy.
Maybe it would be better to show the subject only once with the first email and otherwise only in case it should be changed. It might look like a Webxdc status message. This would make it clear to the user that a specific topic will be discussed from this point onwards. In addition, the email subject is displayed in “Show Full Message” anyway.
Example image:
3.)
Maybe it is possible to create something like threads using the subject.
Just like Webxdc messages, the subject could be displayed in the “Chat Audit Log” of DC-Desktop.
This way one could jump directly to the relevant topics/threads and continue them with “Reply”.
A separate thread overview is also conceivable.
One could access it by clicking on the subject.
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thanks a lot for this worked out suggestion, especially “1.” i find interesting, but also “2.” and thanks for providing screenshots as suggestions 
If we intend to move forward on settling subject-based e-mail handling, some notes:
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think about DC<->DC separately from NDC/DC displays/interactions but aim to unify subject-based mails (chat or not)
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as noted somewhere else, we use a “group title == subject” design – this also needs to be reflected especially in the NDC<->DC interaction, and with whatever we come up with regarding “2.”.
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try to find a step-wise approach instead of discussing a fully-formed out “ideal way” – you already nicely did this with “1.” but “2.” is still a bit hand-wavy
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what about quote-replying an older message (w/o subject from NDC or DC client)?
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Thanks for the constructive criticism.
Points 1 and 2 are my actual proposals.
Point 3 is just a half-baked idea of how a subject could possibly be used in a DC-DC chat.
Originally I didn’t want to publish it.
In order to communicate properly with non-DC users, I think it is necessary to be able to enter a subject.
For example: a DC user receives an email with the subject “Appointment postponement” and responds to it. From this point on, correspondence will be sent under this subject. This can lead to irritation if the DC user wants to wish the non-DC user a happy birthday at some point because the content of the message does not match the subject.
All of this only applies to 1:1 chats. In groups, the name is the subject.
In 1:1 chats with DC users, a subject makes little sense.
However, one could quickly jump to specific parts of the chat history if the subjects were displayed like webxdc status messages in the chat audit log (DC-Desktop).
The message in point 2 is actually only intended to show changes.
Either a new subject or none. It would also be possible to show the subject for each speech bubble, but I think that would be distracting. If necessary, one could check it via “Show Full Message”.
So if there is no subject, the message “No subject” should appear once.
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The solutions Raiden proposes, I think they are wonderful.
I would say, to try to implement something out of them first and then worry maybe about more special cases. I think they are excellent examples of how it could be implementted UI-wise.
It is VERY important to have a subject, as well as attaching more than one files in the same message. That last one would be just a few lines of HTML, as images and data are sent as base64 strings anyway.
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