This is a feature that has already been requested over time, but unfortunately it does not seem easy to realise, here you will find a somewhat more in-depth discussion on the subject: https://support.delta.chat/t/multiple-accounts-and-usage-with-several-email-aliases-on-the-same-email-account/
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I don’t understand the idea. You want to hide your identity and give different email to different chat correspondents? You can do it now if the email aliases are collected in the same IMAP account.
Hi ta.bg,
The idea is to have a different email address for different purposes. For me it is 3 different email address for : Personal, Work and Dating (or social media). All my email address are aliases of the same imap account.
Unfortunately, I tried to chat with two of them in Delta Chat IOS on my iPhone and the conversations became duplicated in the two DC identities. And, to make it worst, the second DC identity I created retrieved most of the first messages of the first identity but not all of them. So, for me, it seems not reliable and/or predictable to use two DC identities on the same imap account.
Does that answer your questions?
Best regards
And what is the problem to have 3 real different email addresses for these purposes? Why aliases?
Because Fastmail, my provider, is a paid one (50$US/year). It keeps my communications private without ads. And, I like to have all my email address under the same account for simplicity of accessibility. They do not sale my private info. I love it.
I think there is some misunderstanding in regard to what an alias is. It does not symbolize an identity, as you as a person can have multiple aliases but only one identity.
What you describe sounds like you sent messages using one alias address and addressed them to another one of yours. Please consider that your aliases are tied to the same mailbox, so it seems logical that it contains duplicates as long as Delta Chat is not aware of all of your alias addresses.
For such a high priced offer I would expect not only a bunch of alias addresses, but also a certain volume of separate mailboxes that can be configured. Then, you really can operate with different identities who use a mailbox of their own for each of them.
There is no misunderstanding of what is an email alias and what is a DC identity. And, to be clear, I performed my tests with a different person who has a different email address, obviously…
My point is that it would be a great DC feature to be able to handle an email alias as a different DC identity to have one separate list of conversation per alias. And no, it is not to have a conversation with myself 
With that feature, I would be able to include a Delta Chat advertising in my 3 email aliase’s signatures, and, not giving my personal email address to everyone in my 3 different networks.
A common usecase to operate several mailboxes…
I agree for Fastmail but generally don’t think it is good idea to mix main email account with Delta Chat. Or you can do something like this: use Fastmail for personal (delta)chat, work account for work chat and register another free (and semi-anonymous) email like Gmail for dating.
Thank you for the workaround suggestion. I’m well aware that I could have 3 separate email accounts.
I just want to point out that we are discussing here in the section “Feature Proposal” of the DC forum. So, it was my two cents suggestion that would make me very happy on my daily usage of DC.
On that, I wish you a beautiful day 
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I do not see this as a workaround suggestion, because it seems to be exactly what you want to have: different DC accounts for separated conversations. Every DC account represents a different mailbox. You can switch from one DC account to another, just as you like.
I am with the German provider Posteo, they take € 1 per month, and they focus on privacy pretty well. So, if I wanted e.g. three dedicated mailboxes to configure them in Delta Chat, I would have to pay € 36 per year.
Thanks, wishing you a beautiful day, too!
Mr gerryfrancis,
Don’t you realize that my '“Feature Proposal” is almost exactly the same as yours. That is why I commented your original post instead of creating a different subject on the forum.
If I understood well, your proposal is to have the possibility to handle aliases in DC like those:
gerry@posteo.fr and gerry@posteo.de
My proposal is a little stretch of yours. It could include some more different aliases like:
eric@fastmail.com, eric@fastmail.fr, eric@mydomain.com and eric2602@mydomain.com
You see. My proposal is not that much different than yours.
Correct, but my usecase is different than yours. I am from Austria, so I use my “at” address, but never the one ending with “de”. (Posteo does not allow to log in with an address other than the “de” one. If I configure my “at” alias in DC manually, I can use it fine, even if I log in with the “de” address.)
I do not need separated chatlists or view filters like you have requested, that is your usecase, not mine. Therefore I would recommend to use more than just one mailbox to keep things in order.
From what I can tell it is a niche use case so I don’t expect that the deltachat team will implement this anytime soon.
Delta Chat looks into 2 folders Inbox and DeltaChat for emails, delta chat does not sort according to email aliases. what you could do is make an filter rule in your mailserver to transfer the mails to different mailboxes depending on what alias is in the “TO” header. Then login to those different mailboxes, but configure the smtp login to your main account and set the account email address to your alias, but then, as gerry pointed out, having dedicated mailboxes is simpler to setup.
If you want to use a classical mail client (like Thunderbird / K-9Mail) and deltachat together, but an alias for deltachat then there is a guide for doing this:
Using Delta Chat with email sub-addresses – Lenz Grimmer's random thoughts
Send from different email address (email aliases) - #3 by pcrockett
But there is no solution to ignore emails addressed to a specific alias, maybe that could be a feature request that is simpler to implement, but then it’s an additional setting that needs to be maintained and users can mess stuf up easily but not reading the advanced warnings the we would put in front of it. But nonetheless maybe that’s a version of your idea that could actually be implemented with not too much effort as advanced setting. But then deltachat holds 6 (2x3accounts) simultaneous connections to your mailserver, which might be more connections than your provider allows.
If DeltaChat folder is not fixed but configurable name and Delta Chat client allows multiple instances, the feature can be implemented with 3 running DC apps and email rules to move incoming messages according to alias name.
exactly if you could configure the “inbox” folder would be super cool for the email nerds and their super cool setups with tons of folders and filters, but that would be a super dangerous setting for most Delta Chat users, also Delta Chat does scan all folders IIRC at least it does for spam folder so you can’t really tell it to only look to one folder? ← @link2xt
I could add such option to DeltaLab which is a fork and can afford to receive the blame and point to use the official Delta Chat client if you want something less advanced, but I also feel it is too overkill and just using different real addresses is simpler
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We are not connected with posteo-de in any way but we are using it since several years and are very satisfied. We pay 1,00 EUR per month, i.e. 12,- EUR/year incl. 2 free aliases. Each alias more cost 0,10 EUR.
We don’t understand why our message was hidden by anyone. We responded with our provider’s terms in the same way as the person in the previous post responded with their provider’s terms. Very strange altogether!
someone flagged/reported it as spam, so it was hidden at first until a moderator rejected the flag.
Hi @Simon! The scenario @gerryfrancis described seems it could be a pretty common one actually (and one that I have encountered as well), lets call it “single account, multiple address, single identity”. This is different from what is described in “using delta chat with sub-addresses”, which would allow you to consider only emails sent to a special email alias as valid conversations by leveraging server configured filters. I should point out that this use case is also different from being able to have multiple identities as described by @Eric2602, who has a “single account, multiple address, multiple identities” need.
I’ll give an example to clarify @gerryfrancis’s request. Say you’re a student who graduated from a school and your school provides you with email forwarding for life from an alumni address (gerry@alumni.example.edu) and an SMTP server for sending from that address.
Under this example gerry would configures alumni email at alumni.example.edu to forward to personal inbox (gerry@example.com) and it should be considered “same identity, different address”. On example.com’s web interface, gerry sets up outgoing configuration to either send from gerry@example.com or gerry@alumni.example.edu.
On the web interface, gerry receives emails sent to both gerry@example.com and gerry@alumni.example.edu and can reply as either address.
Right now, if Delta connects to gerry@example.com, an email sent from sender@example.org to gerry@alumni.example.edu will be considered as a group chat with three addresses (sender@example.org, gerry@example.com, gerry@alumni.example.edu). Additionally, Delta can only send as gerry@example.com.
To provide proper support for aliases in the Delta interface the following changes would need to be made:
- on the receiving end, Delta would understand that for emails sent to gerry@alumni.example.edu, it should consider that address as “me” and would show as conversation between “me” and sender@example.org.
- on the sending end (please keep in mind this is an assumption given my limited understanding of the smtp protocol), Delta would send to smtp.example.com with from email address gerry@alumni.example.edu but as identity of gerry@example.com. the server would understand that the user was sending AS gerry@alumni and connect with the alumni.example.edu server to properly send the email, or send on behalf of it with the appropriate headers depending on configuration. If a new conversation is started, the user should, under this design, be able to select the appropriate from address to start a conversation.
If the outgoing configuration isn’t tied deeply to the Delta interface (I haven’t tried it yet but I assume it is given email address as identity interface) its possible for outgoing the user could add additional sender configurations where Delta connects directly to the SMTP server of choice with user provided configuration instead of using the “alias” approach described above, which relies on the example.com server to do the legwork.
I hope this helps!