Sandra, thanks for your always honest feedback – let’s see what we can do …
First a bit of my background on this. Personally, i’ve always found WKD an interesting concept – even talked about it at the first and only openpgp conference in 2016 and saw it as the future. Around the time several MUA developers got together (enigmail, K9 Mail, delta chat, debian gpg maintainer, mailpile and more) and determined a decentralized MUA-app driven way to distribute key and worked for some hundred hours specifying and implementing https://autocrypt.org in various e-mail apps. From 2018 TB with enigmail was nicely compatible with Delta Chat and also with K-9 mail. On some mailing lists it was suddenly possible to mail many of the subscribers with encrypted mail, directly. However, the TB core team then in 2019 “integrated” enigmail and, against the enigmail’s author and other’s recommendations, struck autocrypt support so that from 2020 on the overall encrypted e-mail situation fragmented again as TB is a heavy weight. Meanwhile mutt (a popular terminal based e-mail client), Fair-Email and Letterbox and others added seemless Autocrypt support.
We are currently working on making Delta Chat work more seamlessly with the way Thunderbird now handles encrypted e-mail.
For Delta Chat to integrate WKD lookups, we would need to integrate it with Autocrypt logic and also with our COUNTERMITM verified group protocols. Autocrypt works across providers and works quite seamlessly. Apart from multi-device setups there rarely are e-mail encryption problems between Delta Chat users. There is the “first message unencrypted” problem but, frankly, it’s not a foremost issue for people who are facing violent repression. However, we want to improve the UX situation there as well, and also add “degradation” warnings if encryption used to work but doesn’t anymore.
But back to WKD. Could you maybe help and provide more details on which MUAs and which providers currently support WKD, maybe also with links to blog posts/documentation? We’ll then discuss and see how DC could support it.