View and change account password

Feature Proposal
1

It seems there is no easy way to view or change the account password in the Delta Chat app.

There is a “Password and Account” option in the settings, but if I understand it correctly this is only useful if you have already changed your account password in a different email client and now want to update this in the Delta Chat app.

Moreover the password field is masked and there is option to toggle the visibility. It would good to have a toggle for the password visibility (maybe after entering the phone PIN).

2

How (and whether) changing passphrases works is completely different for each email provider. We can not handle this from inside the Delta Chat app.

3

Okay. For changing the password I was thinking about the scenario where someone creates a chatmail account specifically for Delta Chat and doesn’t use it with another client, but if there are technical limitations then I suppose there is the option to try using some different client, it’s just not as convenient.

However, the fact that the password can’t be seen or copied means that if you don’t know or forgot your password, you can’t even log in with a different email client to change your password.

The option to see the password would also be good for backup purposes.

I suppose that if you create a Delta Chat backup file, then the password information must be in the backup file somewhere, but this seems like an over-complicated and unintuitive way to retrieve the password.

(By contrast, exporting encryption keys is simple.)

4

It isn’t that hard:
do a backup, download https://sqlitebrowser.org, open the database file that is in the backup tar file with that tool, go to the “config” table, look for the row with your password.

Also Chatmail is not meant to be used or work with other clients, there currently is no way to change a password in chatmail.

5

In DC-Desktop there is a switch to display the password.

6

you can use DeltaLab, a Delta Chat fork with what I consider improvements to the official client, among them, the option to reveal password, you can install it from fdroid adding the IzzyOnDroid store:

I proposed that feature to official DC here:

but it was not accepted in the end (read there for reasoning) so I added it to DeltaLab only

7

Thanks, I learned a lot from all the replies here.

I hadn’t heard about DeltaZen before, it looks pretty sweet!

I didn’t consider all of the possible unintended consequences described in the GitHub thread and the different use cases of people who find it useful vs people who will create configuration problems for themselves.

I normally am in favor of flexibility for the user and would think that a “solution” might involve something like popping up a dialog to tell the user to use “set up second device” instead if that’s what the user wants to do, but in the end this isn’t an important issue so I’ll let it rest.