I used it and it works really well. But either you create a new email account to stop getting bloat in your Deltachat or Chats in your regular email, or... well you get those.
And there is no ability to delete messages on the server, at all. How is this usable? Chats will completely spam Thunderbird etc. and they are not deleted.
I think its only purpose is easy encryption and chat view. Those are key and should come in Thunderbird and K9mail. Like easy easy encryption, and especially automatic "this message contains a PGP key, add it?" (To avoid spam mails sending pgp keys).
And there is no ability to delete messages on the server, at all. How is this usable? Chats will completely spam Thunderbird etc. and they are not deleted.
You have a few options with DeltaChat to delete old messages.
Because when it detects support for encryption or that you are talking to someone using DeltaChat as well, it switches automatically to encrypted conversations.
DeltaChat uses AutoCrypt which needs no user interaction to immediately go for encryption. With traditional emailing with GnuPG and email one would first manually exchange GnuPG keys (or download them from a key server). With DeltaChat this is automated when both users use DeltaChat. With DeltaChat there is no real difference between emailing encrypted with another DeltaChat user, and emailing without encryption with another user which does not use DeltaChat.
Excellent chat option with very elegant construction.
Text messages are instantaneous. Small images (~200KB) are a few seconds.
It is not really built for large files, but that can take up to a few minutes.
Images and video are downsampled to a smaller size before sending, to save bandwidth. (Quality holds up well and there is an option to attach as a 'file' if full resolution is needed.)
Hold mic-button to send voice messages.
Jitsi integration for video calls.
I am also trying the fork: DeltaLab UI that includes a few extra changes.
The setup is easy.
I would recommend using it on a dedicated email account, only for DeltaChat usage. See the docs.
Setting 'delete messages from server' to 'after 1 week' will make sure your online storage is never going to get full. (Server messages can be deleted once transmitted to all clients installs for the recipient)
One of the best FDroid finds over the last year, highly recommended!
My email would run out of storage pretty quickly as I don’t self-host email as it serves a different purpose not related to real-time communications for me. I’ll stick with XMPP.
Does your XMPP provider have a message retention policy ? It would pile up there I guess. With DeltaChat you can, like in Signal messenger, configure disappearing messages to automatically clean up old messages.
Wouldn't this be quite slow to transmit messages? When you send email between federated servers your mail goes in a queue on your server to be sent and depending on the connection speed and how busy it is you could easily wait 5 minutes before it's delivered at the other end. Not that the messages caused by this app would be big enough to slow things down a lot, but if the server you are using is also being used to send normal emails with large attachments then you could end up waiting a while.
I'd be curious to see what the UX is for people who recieve these messages as regular emails. Does it look and feel okay? Personally I have my email notifications configured pretty heavily around the assumption that they will be sparse and substantial, so the sort of person who texts by hitting "send" as a punctuation mark (most people I talk to on Discord and WA are like this), could be really annoying.
In DeltaChat regular emails look the same as the encrypted DeltaChat emails except for the tiny green lock icons. Emails from DeltaChat to DeltaChat end up in a separate DeltaChat mail folder so there is no unreadable clutter in the email inbox when using a regular email client. I think DeltaChat could be great for normies because it is not super difficult to install and configure and use, and the messages part looks like the popular chat client WhatsApp.
As someone who is both a massive degenerate AND a math/science nerd, I can confidently say that you are way off base. If a lowercase delta looks like a vibrator to you, that's a 'you' problem.
