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).
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.)
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.
you can use ArcaneChat, 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
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
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.
Hello @bencan and @missytake
I have been reading this post and also reading DeltaChat doc. Not sure I followed properly. Is it possible to reset the password of the accounts created to be used within Delta Chat? More specifically, if creating an account on nine.testrun.org, is it possible to reset the password?
Asking this because I would like to know that if my current password stops working at some point (for whatever reason), I would be able to retrieve my account and its contacts, etc.
Thanks in advance.
@zon everything important is on your phone. make a backup to be able to restore it. delta chat only uses email servers as dumb routers/transport for your messages, those servers store nothing about your contacts.
instead of making a backup, you could also transfer the account to a second device, then you can restore from there in the future.
Also reset password is not possible. You gave no data when creating the account, so how can you prove that the account was yours? other providers have security questions, telephone number, another email address or postal address. chat mail has no such data points about you.
I have the understanding that chatmail servers DO or could keep at least messages. Three reasons for it:
1.Delta chat app → Settings → Connectivity. At nine.testrun.org 400MiB are kept (I guess the last 400MiB of data/messages the server dealt with),
2. Delta chat app → Chats and Media → Delete old messages → Delete messages from Server. Meaning, they then DO storage messages on the server.
3. nine.testrun.org privacy policy says they keep messages for 20 days, then they delete them.
I guess it all depends on the server we are talking about (?), in this case nine.testrun.org.
Thanks for the tip about transfer the account to a second device, so that a restoration is possible in another new device on my end.
Well… somehow… I did typed an random email address at nine.testrun.org server (and a new password for it), which is unique within that server. See this link. So… somehow… I was thinking of Delta Chat making available to potentially rescue my account if everything goes wrong on my side (no back up made, etc). For example, a XMPP server does include that functionality for password recovery: Login - Your account on conversations.im
you may use delta chat with a classic email provider that offers this password reset service.
Still a recovery from just IMAP messages is not supported by delta chat, especially not when the messages are encrypted and you lost your decryption key.
The storage that you are talking about on nine.testrun.org is just temporary and a maximum. It is not actually “storage”, you can think of it like a buffer or your physical post/mail box, you go there, fetch your letters and parcels - you don’t actually use that box for storage, if you did, then there would be no space left to receive more letters.
You described two different situations in the thread above.
The situation you described above assumes something goes wrong on the server or there is a server-side issue, while the situation you described below assumes something goes wrong on your phone.
If there is a server issue which makes your current password stop working for whatever reason but everything is still working on your phone then it might be better to use AEAP to continue messaging contacts. You can easily continue chatting with your contacts using a new email address while keeping the same encryption and identity key.
However if something goes wrong on your phone, then you need a different approach. The email server doesn’t store any account or contact information so there’s nothing to “retrieve” from there except possibly new/unread messages.
As Simon says, all your contacts and encryption keys are stored on your phone, so it’s advisable to make a backup, although Delta Chat currently doesn’t encrypt it so you better make sure to encrypt it yourself if you plan to upload your backup or transfer it over an insecure channel. I use OpenKeychain to encrypt backups on Android, but unfortunately this app is not maintained. Backups can also be unnecessarily large because they also include all the media from your chats, but I hope that improvements to the backup feature are being considered to address these issues.
You should keep backups up-to-date especially after adding new contacts.
I have also suggested a feature to request contacts to automatically resend encryption keys, which I think could help to recover contacts in specific circumstances when your backup is not up-to-date, but this won’t apply to every situation.
everything important is on your phone. make a backup to be able to restore it. delta chat only uses email servers as dumb routers/transport for your messages, those servers store nothing about your contacts.
If there is a server issue which makes your current password stop working for whatever reason but everything is still working on your phone then it might be better to use AEAP to continue messaging contacts. You can easily continue chatting with your contacts using a new email address while keeping the same encryption and identity key.
Trying to follow here. When having to use AEAP because I my email account got hacked and I do not know the valid password anymore or the password does not work anymore because of a server issue (let’s say an issue at nine.testrun.org)… then… I would not be able to actually forward my emails received in my old account to my new account (which I would newly encode in the Delta Chat app). Then… I guess it would be still be fine (?). Because as @Simon says, the email server would just act as a “dumb router” for my messages. As a small damage, I guess I could lose those messages that are in the “buffer zone” between the moment my Delta Chat stops operating with my old email address and the moment I encode my new email address in my Delta Chat app. Is that assumption correct?
If my assumption is not correct… what happens then if I am not able to forward my emails from my old email address to the new one? If talking exclusively about 1:1 chat conversations, will I have to for example start new 1:1 chat conversations with every single contact, so that the communication is actually possible again? If that is the case, I would then have a chat conversation with, let’s say, Person A belonging to the old email address… and a new chat conversation with the same Person A belonging to the new email address (?).
Sorry in advance if this would have been discussed in other somewhere in other threads.
Generic question. Just curious… where does the match between my identity key and my email address happen? At the mobile device level?