There have been lots of complaints and suggestions about subject lines.
It seems any standard subject line is a bad idea, because:
*it makes it easy to identify and block Deltachat traffic.
*different users have different preferences on what information should be included
*people using other mail clients/MUAs see and dislike uselessly monotonous automated subject lines.
I suggest letting all participants in a chat reset the subject line whenever they want (using a textbox in the topbar with a dropdown menu of recent subjects, or similar). Their next message would bear that subject, and others, once they have received that message, would switch to that subject.
I also suggest colorcoding/patterning the background by the subject of the messages, and allowing filtering by subject.
This would be a genuinely useful functionality for chats in which multiple subjects are discussed concurrently (as is common). In any chat in which this functionality was not useful, it could be ignored.
Mail subject lines are transmitted unencrypted. If you have a terrible employer or government, you could establish social conventions like “All discussions of protests should use subject lines about cooking”. The e-mails will then look unobjectionable.
And finally, compatibility with other mailclients/MUAs would improve.
I agree with many of your points, especially the part about subject lines being a fingerprint that can expose Delta Chat traffic.
Personally, I think Delta Chat should aim to be as invisible as possible, ideally blending in with normal e-mail traffic — no obvious patterns, no identifiable headers, no subject line formats that scream “this is Delta Chat”. Just plain, messy, human-like e-mails. That’s the best defense.
Your idea of flexible subjects and visual filtering within the app is interesting and might help usability, but only if it doesn’t create obvious patterns externally. Otherwise, we’re just making it easier for filters and surveillance to spot and flag Delta Chat messages.
Perhaps the first time a subject is used in a chat, it goes out plain, and subsequent reuses get prefixed by"Re:"? With that, a free choice of subject, and a free choice of when to change it, I should think the patterns will be like normal email.
You know, I’d read that the plaintext subjects were “…” somewhere, and the real subjects were encrypted, but it slipped my mind. My apologies; I stand corrected.
I’ve struck through parts of my original post accordingly.
I’ve thought this over, and I think a better UI would be a show/hide toggleable “Subject:” text field just above the chat text entry field (toggle it in the “+” menu).
If you manually alter the contents of this “Subject:” field, the field background changes color, and your next message will go out with that subject. Otherwise it contains the subject of the most recently-received message.
A drop-down (well, drop-up) menu gives the most recent subjects in the chat, in chronological order of last appearance. So you can manually set it to a past subject, or type your own new subject.
Subjects are coded by background colour, both in the subject field and in the chat (behind the speech bubbles). Mousing over or clicking on the chat background should give the subject text in a popup. For screenreader use, the subject should be displayed as hidden text at the beginning of each message which has a different subject from the preceeding message.
Ignoring this functionality would give the status quo (apart from a “Show message subjects” field in the “+” menu).