It’s unclear what the wanted path of the devs is. The default is to use the testrun.org server; isn’t that against the vision of delta chat though? using a central server for most users.
My opinion:
The wanted path of the devs is that you are free to choose. Having a default Chatmail server provides ease of use, allowing to register with just a few clicks, as well as some piece of mind that the server won’t go down in a month when the owner forgets about it.
Chatmail: Relays lists some other public Chatmail servers.
If you are satisfied with it.
If you want to use email for things other than Delta Chat, and if you are willing to maintain it.
It might be useful for people other than yourself, so it would be nice; + if you are willing to maintain it.
They’re generally not as well supported as Chatmail, e.g. in terms of push notifications, send limits, spam filtering and stuff. “Classic email servers” are supported, but are falling out of favor for Delta Chat as a project. See
Wouldn’t Delta Chat just become something similar to Xmpp then ? What would the advantages left be over xmpp?
Running your own Chatmail server should be lower-maintenance than running a regular mailserver, but you won’t be able to use it to send or get unencrypted mails, and the code isn’t as well-tested yet.
I don’t think there is any risk of Deltachat abandoning classic e-mail support. The suggestion to drop classic e-mail support was made in protest of a UI change (below) and got zero support; not even the proposer thought it was a good idea.
Use of unencrypted classic mails is being discouraged, by slightly degrading the user experience in unencrypted chats (all the avatars are the same grey box).