UX regression when onboarding new users

Feature Proposal
4

Autocrypt should automatically upgrade to encryption if you and your corresponding FRIEND both ask it to

I agree that this should work. Unfortunately, this is currently broken in two ways:

  1. I have no way of getting Delta Chat to add “prefer-encrypt=mutual” to my autocrypt header. Except maybe for manually editing the database as you suggest – but I don’t think that would be consistent with the general UX concept Delta Chat is aiming for. This particular issue has been reopened as "Prefer encrypt" setting was removed without resetting it to the default value · Issue #3911 · deltachat/deltachat-android · GitHub and I hope this will be solved as soon as a new version containing Remove e2ee_enabled preference by link2xt · Pull Request #7172 · chatmail/core · GitHub becomes available.

  2. Even if the prefer-encrypt property is set correctly, autocrypt will not kick in in conversations between Delta Chat users. As link2xt explained: “Autocrypt support is not removed. […] What is missing is the upgrade path for two Delta Chat clients” (see Support for non-chatmail email - #2 by link2xt).

Seifferth, detailed descriptions of what happened are useful, and the point-form helps. But it is difficult to respond to very long posts.

For the key issues I want to address, please refer to the “tl;dr” section. Everything else is just additional context in case that section alone should be too concise. To paraphrase these two key points:

  1. Autocrypt does not work properly any more.
  2. Performing SecureJoin duplicates existing 1:1 conversations. I would very much prefer it if SecureJoin would upgrade them instead.

I suppose these issues could be solved by introducing an upgrade path from non-e2ee-enabled conversations to e2ee-enabled conversations. This upgrade path is something link2xt mentioned in Support for non-chatmail email - #2 by link2xt (already cited above). I have posted some thoughts on what this upgrade path could look like here: Prompt to switch to encrypted chat when it is available - #6 by seifferth. I do realize that that post is not particularly short either.

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