Query/Request
Are there any Deltachat clients that can display messages like a conventional mail client, with an inbox, drafts, filters, folders etc.?
Ideally I’d like a desktop client where I can set some accounts to have a chat UI, and others to have an epistolary UI. Two separate clients would also be fine.
Reasons
Chat is nice, but sometimes you want to send a long-form letter, especially when the recipient is on a very different sleep schedule. Ideally, I’d communicate with the same friends through both formats.
Communications work better when the UIs match. I generally don’t want to chat-format conversations with friends who are using a classic email client. Conversing across this difference in UIs is a surprisingly substantial bit of friction and discourages unilateral adoption. Also, if your emails are weird others assume it’s because this new Deltachat thing you are using is rubbish.
Userbase
Several people have said, on this forum, that they use Deltachat clients for regular emails. They might also like an epistolary UI. Let us know .
There are plenty of people who want a classic epistolary-UI email client, but also want encrypted email that is not nearly impossible to set up (there are people who’ve wanted this since the 1980s). I’d like to be able to tell them about “an open-source email client, but it complies with the Deltachat open standard. That means easy end-to-end encryption, with any correspondent also using a Deltachat-compliant client”. They’d go for that. Telling them that the standard also enables text chat, and peer-to-peer, and these things called webxdc apps, and so on, would be secondary (and some of them would actively not want that functionality, and prefer a client that lacks it or can turn it off).
Currently an email like ui is not a priority of Delta Chat, as the goal is to provide a messenger and adding a whole new “classical” not chats-based UI is out of scope.
However we are happy to answer questions and help other projects to implement the standards we use, so someone could make an email app that supports some of delta chat’s features.
Or if someone wants to convince us that it is a good idea to build it into DC, then fork it and do it → actions speak louder than ideas. (but I personally think that a whole new combined UI is not possible to do in a way that is still easy navigate for normies and cheap to maintain - though with that I only mean full UI, where I think dedicated app is better. I think we might add ability to set subject for emails and other compatibility features, just no completely different UI)
Wow, Autocrypt support has improved since last I looked. Thank you for the link to the list, I was looking for that. Deltachat is still the only one marked as fully implementing everything. Of the clients with pretty good implementation, K9 Mail and Ltt.rs are Android, Letterbox is iOS, and Mutt and Neomutt are command-line. KMail (desktop GUI) is not on the 1.1.0 doc list, but it says it implements Autocrypt, since a release in April 2021 (apparently funded by NLnet, and with some interesting UI design effort). This is all good. Other clients may lack the easy key exchange of a Deltachat client, but I can copy keys.
The consistency and ease of use of the Deltachat backend has made it a defacto standard. I would be delighted if someone made a epistolary UI in a Deltachat client, but unfortunately I’m not likely to get to it myself.
I think you are saying that it would be difficult to make a non-confusing UI for a client with both chat and epistolary display modes, and it might be easier to have a separate client. Sorry if I have misunderstood you. Just adding email subjects would help a lot, I get scolded for not having good subjects.
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