(This seems redundant now, that manual key imports will likely be removed)

[bencan]

@link2xt

Exporting and importing keys does not work as a small backup. If you lose all contacts and their keys you will also not be able to tell which group chats are valid because you have no “verified” contacts to start with. Not to say that you will not be able to see any groups you are in until you receive some message there.

That’s correct, thanks for pointing this out. I had in mind to export the keys as well as the vcards for all my contacts, although I didn’t mention the vcards above since they weren’t relevant to the discussion. My assumption is that the keys and the vcards would be sufficient for a small backup, and for group chats I’d either need to export the links for group chats in my backup or ask contacts to add me again to the groups when I restore from a backup. However the keys alone are only half a backup, and the vcards alone are only half a backup!

@link2xt

In case of Delta Chat importing the same key into multiple profiles is not going to work properly as it already triggers AEAP and we want to move to the contacts being identified primarily by the key fingerprint rather than email address.

Automatically triggering AEAP is clearly a problem in this case!

If you are moving to identifying contacts primarily by key fingerprint, maybe this is a good time to design for the possiblity of supporting multihoming in the future as suggested here by SoniEx2?

@link2xt

RSA keys without a subkey (which is then used to do both encryption and signing which is generally considered a bad idea

Do you have recommendations where I can read to learn more about this for general interest?

@aelius

Although, as deltachat increasingly encourages chatlike norms (reacts, editing past messages, maximum of 1 quote reply, etc)

I don’t think the maximum of 1 quote for replies is a result of Delta Chat encouraging chatlike norms. There has been some disccusion here about making text selectable in all clients and some discussion here about adding markdown support, so with these features added it should be possible to write replies with multiple quotes, which would be great! (Admittedly the discussion about making the text selectable was started over five years ago, so maybe it’s not a priority feature, but I don’t think this was limited to encourage chatlike norms.)

However I am curious exactly what type of message a recipient using a traditional email client (or an older version of Delta Chat) sees when a message is edited or deleted? This is not explained clearly in the FAQ.