Chatmail makes e-mail cheap again
new chatmail-based instant onboarding system, e-mail addresses are becoming, like in the early 2000s, cheap and virtually free. But this time around, there is no company posturing to “do no evil” luring everyone to their central “ethical” service and then drop the pretense soon after. Running a chatmail server is a cheap activity that we want people to be able to do on the side and on low-end hardware all across the world. Chatmail is best described as an ephemeral end-to-end encrypted messaging routing system running at Internet-scale.
someone needs to rewrite this, both the post here and the promo copy on the website, it’s hella confusing and explains nada.
OK, so what this purports to do is use your email server as chat platform. kinda intriguing, could have several use cases, don’t know what it does with existing email or how the chat looks like in e.g. thunderbird…
unfortunately, after installing it and being unsuccessful about having it login to my IMAP account (works fine with thunderbird), I’ve given up.
so, the “onboarding” is less than stellar and the desktop app is electron, which I hate; haven’t tried the android app.
edit: it works, the initial login process just takes super long; guess it’s trying different ports and stuff to be auto-magical. works fine for intra-server comms (accounts belonging to same domain), adding secondary device works (android, from f-droid). comms (encrypted) are stored in a separate IMAP folder that’s unreadable to “normal” mail clients, so it doesn’t disturb e.g. thunderbird. a fine array of customizations in the apps, will be testing it further.
Applause 👏 for the Delta Chat team for coming up with such a creative solution for onboarding non-technical users into using email for secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, with the User experience of the familiar Messaging app.
agreed, this is an amazing way to get people to use something secure without having to make “yet another account”
For someone relatively tech illiterate like myself- how does this compare to something like telegram and signal? What’s the benefit?
the benefit is that it uses the existing email systems, and doesnt require account or data storage with other services
the benefit is that it uses the existing email systems
Instant Message Delivery
These two things conflict then. SMTP as a protocol is NOT instant. Far from actually. It’s best effort.
i havent looked deep into the protocol, so i cant argue.
Libre software and more decentralised than Signal but less than SimpleX.
people are free to make choices.
Good defaults help spread libre software, privacy.
Maybe, but then people disagreeing with those defaults leads to the massive amount of fragmentation and “too many choices” we are now dealing with in the FOSS world.
What is up with SimpleX people? It’s like the new Rust or NixOS crowd. Anytime a messenger is mentioned, you can bet there’s a comment about SimpleX in there.
SimpleX is libre software and decentralised, the most decentralised voice chat here, so why spread anything else?
Can someone ELI5? I still don’t get it after reading the post description and the link.
It’s a instant messenger that uses email as the backbone.
Kind of like how SMS and MMS was bootstrapped to a telephone number.
Very nice, a big issue for nooby users was the mess Deltachat created in their regular email inbox.