Using Delta Chat in 'white list' situation [oppressive government, how are attachments stored]

[IverCold]

Hi! My family and friends live in country with goverment repressions and total internet control. We are looking for the new ways to communicate constantly. What appealed to me in Delta Chat is that I can set it up with ‘white listed’ email service. And it already works great.

So my question is - Is it secure in the sense of govermental forces reading my emails? I see them as empty emails with 2 attachments, so nothing to read here without a key.

And 2nd question is where are attachments stored? I don’t see them in my email folder. I read in FAQ that they are encrypted too.

I’ve read this post but it haven’t answered my questions still:

How it integrates into email?

I have read over the site and watched a couple of videos. I am still a little confused. Does delta chat needs it own email account? What I mean, is that if I use delta chat on my mail email account, how does the email software I use (thunderbird in my case) know when it is a delta chat message, and vice versa? Or, are the all mixed together? If they are mixed together, than with all the various chats, and the emails coming in, managing would be a challenge. As well, it talks about the m…

[Manjago]

Hi, buddy! I’m in exactly the same situation. I’ve set up my account on mail.ru.

They won’t be able to read the messages — everything is encrypted — but the security services will easily reconstruct the entire “social graph”: they’ll be able to see the size of the message, who sent it, and who it was sent to.

So this tool is fine for personal correspondence — it’s good for staying in touch with friends and not losing contact with them — but that’s about it.

[IverCold]

Thanks for the answer! Encryption is enough for me. There is still a question about attachments.

I saw a post about using mail.ru, but their tech support said that IMAP/SMTP will be pay-to-use (for some users it is already behind paywall). So Yandex is kinda safe bet - even if it will be pay-to-use, it will be included in their subscription.

[Manjago]

Glad to help! For the record — I’m using mail.ru via IMAP for free (with an app password), no issues at all.

On MAIL.RU, these emails appear as messages with two attachments. Out of curiosity, I extracted the private encryption key from the client’s backup, downloaded the attachment and decrypted it — everything’s correct, it all matches up.

[veritas]

hi, this communication in a country with a repressive government is safe and quite stable and calls work…
in the delta chat settings regarding storing messages on the server, set it to delete immediately after loading and then everything will be stored on the phone

[Manjago]

There is no point in deleting emails, it is an illusion of security. this makes no sense, the letter arrived on the server and has already been entered into the intelligence services database, with all the information - who wrote and to whom