Delta Chat

Secure decentralized messaging for all major platforms and then some. Reliable and instant by using fast and secure Chatmail servers, but also compatible with classic e-mail providers. Offering chat-shared web apps for fun and collaboration, end-to-end encrypted and without any server side hosting. Security-Audited multiple times, last in 2024. Chat over e-mail and head back to the future with us! Avoid xkcd927 :)

Website: https://delta.chat
Download: https://get.delta.chat
Support Forum: https://support.delta.chat

Public Key

npub17gpd02zrcswhzlwa7m9sz0tw76ylgncjy9xxa4ppkjzqyzhvygyqvynrxn

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0yqkh4ppug8t30hwldjcp84h0dz05fufzznrw6ssmfpqzptkzyzqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds6hw0w4

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub17gpd02zrcswhzlwa7m9sz0tw76ylgncjy9xxa4ppkjzqyzhvygyqvynrxn

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Last Notes

2024-07-02 10:42:44

If you want to dive deep into guaranteed end-to-end encryption and how green checkmarks protect against compromised servers ("MITM attacks"), the "Cryptographic Analysis of Delta Chat" from Applied Cryptography researchers at ETH Zuerich has been published at https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/918.pdf -- earlier this year we had blogged from our side how we addressed all findings https://delta.chat/en/2024-03-25-crypto-analysis-securejoin
#securejoin #deltachat

2024-07-01 06:46:24

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does this persistently happen? Chatmail servers do strict verification of "dkim" signatures for incoming messages. If you can please file an issue on https://GitHub.com/deltachat/chatmail

2024-06-29 17:45:03

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any particular error message from the nine server?

2024-06-23 10:22:45

Delta Chat collabs are cooking new major features by a series of discussion/coding steps with roughly this recipe mix:
- one part: discussing a feature and its step wise implementation
- three parts: how does it square with usability outcomes (eg avoiding failure modes in the dialogue trees; who really needs this? what do they say themselves?)
- one part: how it can be attacked? Focus on real security outcomes.
- two parts: how can we avoid maintenance monsters for future us?

2024-06-22 22:42:19

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unused nine.testrun.org will be auto-deleted soon (eg https://github.com/deltachat/chatmail/pull/327 ) but note that today an e-mail address is only a single row in a sqlite table that contains e-mail address, hashed-password, last-login columns. Messages are auto-removed (after 7-20 days, depending on server) so there really doesn't remain much data even today.
For more info on "e2e-encrypted-only" see original chatmail server announcement december 2023 https://delta.chat/en/2023-12-13-chatmail

2024-06-22 15:00:11

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DeltaTauri is a stepping-stone, not the "runs in my browser tab" feature that you wish for. FYI Delta Chat is generally more geared to helping people in repressive situations and those are usually a) very mobile oriented b) don't mind so much installing a desktop app if it really works well and helps them. A web interface can also be helpful but it comes with own challenges (see also @npub18sq…29ap remark) so we generally weigh it against other more immediate needs.

2024-06-21 09:01:49

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do you have a source link for this table ?

2024-06-20 14:39:34

Great, so #chatcontrol was not moving forward today thanks also to various interventions from folks around the fediverse .... In particular @npub1vt7…5vdp for the clear take from Signals side. But it's clearly not canceled and Hungary will retry getting it through, and France, having elections soon, might drop out of opposing it? Let's stay vigilant about #chatcontrol and help eg @npub1tw4…7pv8 and @npub1w4r…8cxz and other groups to help us working against authoritarian #chatcontrol fantasies.

2024-06-20 11:04:07

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wait a second. Your dad has a PGP public key setup? You weren't talking about your own usage that you want to message people but don't know how to best get the PGP key into your delta chat profile? Is your dad using thunderbird then or what is if we may ask?

2024-06-20 10:17:15

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sorry that you encounter this problem .... This use case is indeed not well enough supported yet. It's not well documented but 1.46 grew at the last minute "attach contact" which creates a vcard file with name, email address, avatar and public key. You might create such an attachment and then create a similar one and send it to yourself or so .... Not super elegant but should work and you could automate it with a script if that is within your abilities.

2024-06-18 22:10:07

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current target os is debian 12 ..... Some others were looking into adapting it for OpenBSD ....maybe [@outofcreativity](https://bsd.network/@outofcreativity ) knows something

2024-06-18 20:52:21

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it runs on a raspberry pi and should be fine for a hundred users or so at least, probably much more.

2024-06-18 18:46:11

some news regarding rPGP, the minimal #Rust #OpenPGP implementation that stably provides end-to-end encryption since many years:
- a new FAQ including questions about IETF specs, Post-Quantum cryptography, Autocrypt, LibrePGP, Seqouia etc. https://github.com/rpgp/rpgp/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md
- NLNET just granted #OpenPGP V6 work on rPGP: https://nlnet.nl/project/rPGP-cryptorefresh/
rPGP is an independent and stable project which provides good general #OpenPGP interoperability, see "rpgpie" in https://tests.sequoia-pgp.org/

2024-06-15 18:46:49

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technically speaking, the chatmail developers are contracted at merlinux but not for running nine which happens totally on the side but without an extra legal form (yet?). We have a tentative "Multi-Address" dev plan for dc apps where each chat profile would use several chatmail servers, migrating to new ones if old ones are inoperable .... It would then be less problematic to onboard on random servers .... Driven by the motto of https://testrun.org but it will take a while.

2024-06-15 18:09:32

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fair question. Chatmail was first announced in December 2023 and since then five public and a few private chatmail server appeared while development on the core chatmail repo continues. Default on nine happens mostly for stability reasons as we are only learning how stable everything runs, and that also depends on operators and social dynamics. We aim to diversify onboarding but also are running on low budget, compared to what we are doing. Rome wasn't torn down in a day :)

2024-06-15 17:13:44

We got note of three #deltachat articles from different angles the last days:
Roskomvoboda, human rights org in russia, interviewing
@npub1uqe…za0f about our recent interaction with the russian telco authorities.
https://roskomsvoboda.org/ru/post/delta-chat-snova-otkazal-roskomnadzoru/
@npub1qwt…l6re about "do's and don'ts" after re-engaging with Delta Chat happily.
https://binblog.de/2024/06/15/deltachat-first-dos-first-donts/
@npub1af2…fgf8 about Signal and "Delta Chat for anarchists"
https://phlanticap.noblogs.org/delta-chat-for-anarchists/

2024-06-15 16:59:18

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message delay is not large if you use a chatmail address. See https://delta.chat/en/2023-12-13-chatmail for the original announcement and https://delta.chat/en/chatmail for a list of community chatmail servers

2024-06-14 10:56:15

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doing something against child abuse is much better and more directly done by routing all the #chatcontrol money (billions overall for sure) to support european social and healthcare workers who are strained and often unable to care for real abuse-cases in their constituencies.

2024-06-13 17:18:35

Back to more interesting matters than these authoritarian #chatcontrol dreams (ah, don't you bet many "AI" companies are lining up to sell automated policing?) ...
Thanks to @npub1f96…fp0d there now is a rather official #deltachat #arch package https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/deltachat-desktop 💜

2024-06-13 16:50:09

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the default assumption for "messengers" these days is the app provider also controls the message transport. For the mainstream ones it's certainly true. They can not easily know that a fundamental point about delta chat is that it does this δifferently :)

2024-06-13 13:23:07

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first of all #chatcontrol needs to be prevented, and if that fails, to be aimed for cancellation at the European courts. Second, assuming it gets through, we will, all relevant parts of the ecosystem being Foss licensed, not be able to stop the proliferation of forks which will be nicely interoperable, thanks to DC being deeply based in the federated practises of the email and openpgp encryption systems. No central key server or messaging transport required.

2024-06-13 10:43:54

As you know, governmental forces within the EU, the US, the UK, Russia and others are in a hot competition on who gets to be the first to subvert end-to-end encryption. A few days ago, we got another letter from Roskomnadzor, the #russia telco authority, to help them get at user data or metadata for #deltachat users. But there is no central registry of e-mail addresses, messages or decryption keys. So we declined. Sorry, not sorry.
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/608/375/418/337/988/original/e80bd0ea529dac9d.png

2024-06-11 16:18:55

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that's a pretty interesting crate. When some of us engaged on dkim verification status the problem was less the parsing and more knowing "what comes from my own provider". When we'll revisit this, possibly in the context of chatmail where this is easier, well make sure to also checkout your crate for potential use.

2024-06-10 09:41:24

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see https://delta.chat/en/help#message-metadata

2024-06-09 14:29:58

An enjoyable and fruitful #OpenPGP email 2024 summit closing up .... with many standardization efforts roughly agreed between several players: maximizing metadata protection (IETF header protection effort), ecosystem transition V4->V6 and PQ-keys (IETF replacement keys), #autocrypt level 2 possibly involving integration of "in-band" with "out of band" key distribution like WKD/HKP which themselves are bound for integration. Believe it or not .... the eco system is moving ;)
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/586/623/814/507/678/original/03a894e3acf8bc7c.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/586/623/804/737/382/original/329822f2faa3ee56.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/586/643/700/184/439/original/993e2df493ae3ead.jpg

2024-06-09 12:17:37

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ten years ago it was folk knowledge that "email is insecure, slow, has too much metadata" but now it's 2024 and delta chat and chatmail are not a theory but an audited reality of existing apps and servers that work, secure and fast and with minimal metadata and no personal data. "Gmail" is not a fitting conceptual frame for what we are doing even though our efforts are interoperable with it and people can use guaranteed end to end encryption through Gmail.

2024-06-09 07:59:35

The #EUGoingDark 42-point plan for after the election has it all: breaking e2e encryption, "lawful" data retention, prohibiting encrypting metadata, threatening jail to developers for non compliance ..... If we thought political currents are moving against privacy then this is a new severity worthy of the worst authoritarian states dreams ... https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/first-insight-42-key-points-of-the-secret-eugoingdark-surveillance-plan-for-the-new-eu-commission/

2024-06-07 08:51:01

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sure, also there is a second post under the top. Massive multi-device ftw! :)

2024-06-07 08:44:48

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Before you ask: communities are massive multi-device setups. Delta's multi device setup is one of the most robust in the messenger industry. Turns out you can do multi device setups across different people's devices and #chatmail servers are fine with it. Because why not? Never before did a massive feature like "communities" arrive virtually overnight .... And unlike matrix spaces and discord communities they can be addressed and are not just closed circles where you need to join first.

2024-06-07 08:38:27

News from our direct action R&D #deltalab : Addressable communities. End to end encrypted. No state on servers.
Attached: first a chat from deltafans with the hispanohablantes community ... where someone from the Spanish side invites deltafans folks to join it.
Second is the Spanish community chatlist where lots of chatting is going on ... Also includes the chat with the deltafans community.
Both are independently running and can adress/ be adressed with a messenger UX you already know.
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/573/949/524/973/533/original/8adde2f18e6d2bb5.png
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/573/949/508/169/842/original/d5bff438471bf578.png

2024-06-06 10:11:55

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ja also Debian ist schon unser Fokus^^ ist halt etwas niedrigschwelliger als Arch für Menschen die gerade erst in Systemadministration einsteigen, und auch das einzige was wir derzeit kontinuierlich testen^^

2024-06-05 14:39:48

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ah, ein Problem - cmdeploy, das script mit dem chatmail deployed wird, ist davon abhängig dass auf dem server apt installiert ist. also zumindest der Server muss auf Debian oder Ubuntu laufen.

2024-06-05 08:45:15

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sorry, wir haben keine invites für chaos social --- dass läuft ggf. eher über den örtlichen CCC/hackspace. Einige im Delta kontext benutzen arch auf dem laptop aber chatmail ist derzeit debian-basiert, andere probieren es gerade auf OpenBSD und es spricht nichts Arch -- nur dass die chatmail-repository devs sich vor allem um Debian kümmern auf absehbare Zeit.

2024-06-04 23:16:13

Upsie! We forgot to mention what is also new with the rolling android 1.46 release: android also got "arbitrary" reactions now . In some real family chats this is more appreciated than all the other news :)
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/112/560/402/047/526/796/original/ca69d938290372bc.jpg

2024-06-02 14:30:21

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a malicious Chatmail server could store all data in the hope of selling it to some future NSA-like entity which would employ quantum computers to decrypt messages, possibly, and then employ some massive AI operation to make any sense of it (as if). But today's real life threat in 99.99 percent of cases is "somebody grabs or hacks my device" and "network is gone or flaky" .... a reality for many facing authoritarian repression or worse, today.

2024-06-02 14:07:02

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yes but "aeap" is not often used in practise yet ( https://delta.chat/en/2022-09-14-aeap ) and has some limitations. We have plans to take up aeap and move it to he next level but they are not immediate plans.

2024-06-02 13:47:53

It's a crazy property of #chatmail that it practically has zero state: if a Chatmail server is raided, burns to the ground etc but you still have DNS control, you just set it up somewhere and people can continue chatting. In that sense it's really like a router .... You can turn it off, wipe discs, reinstall and turn it on. Theoretically someone might take your address if they arrive first with their login but they would not get readable message content so it would be more annoying than unsafe

2024-06-02 11:08:45

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How to get somewhat sufficient funding remains a question, however economic our approach is. We avoided VC funding and rather went for public tax-based funds because our efforts are driven by what we consider to be in the public interest. It is said that humanity can be morally.judged by how well those are doing who are living through the worst. We often focus on users in imminently dangerous situations but this is not where you can or want to earn money from, let alone surplus.

2024-06-01 23:09:27

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agreed .... In the new faq push notifications section we discuss it similarly https://delta.chat/en/help#instant-delivery

2024-06-01 22:29:42

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it's pointed out in multiple places that you can visit other Chatmail servers and tab the invite qr code to get a chat profile there. https://delta.chat/chatmail
Nine is very likely to run for a long time as there are 4 admins and it's the default onboarding server and run a pretty automatically

2024-06-01 21:11:20

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Not sure what you mean -- https://delta.chat/en/help#instant-delivery contains more precise descriptions regarding Google FCM push notifications.

2024-06-01 21:09:02

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we are bound to look into that soon. Do you have experience with it yourself?

2024-06-01 20:54:09

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iOS push notifications for Chatmail servers were already there with the1.44 release. The new 1.46 release introduces push notifications for Android gplay.

2024-06-01 20:03:46

A major milestone in our 6+ years long project history: With the rolling 1.46 #deltachat app releases you can start chatting without a pre-existing e-mail address, and benefit from push notifications (instant message delivery) also on Android. We also highlight ways to get in contact with bots and humans, and how #chatmail makes e-mail cheap again https://delta.chat/en/2024-05-31-instant-onboarding

2024-06-01 11:45:07

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good news:
there is a a draft pull request greatly improving the display on small screens:
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-desktop/pull/3878
with this it will be similar to the Android version with a full screen for chat list and another for the open chat

2024-05-31 22:56:41

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account management is not yet fully scoped, we plan to add a tool for this: https://github.com/deltachat/chatmail/issues/19
for now, if you want to delete an account (and re-create it with a more secure password, for example), just send a message to [email protected].

2024-05-28 18:46:49

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we don't have measurements but we'd expect delta chat and chatmail servers to be more energy efficient than matrix and others .... Network locality is only on part of the energy equation. Others are energy consumption on the phone and on servers and Chatmail servers are know to run on low resources servers (raspberry pi etc) for hundreds of users easily. It n eds measurements to verify this claim though.

2024-05-25 20:05:52

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they do understand what they want: readability and control at society-scale. Only for good purposes of course, defined by whoever is in government currently. What could possibly go wrong considering democracies all over Europe are in such great and stable shape?
#chatcontrol is also billions-euro-level business to be had! Is no one thinking of the poor starving big companies happy to promise automated mass control and policing? </Irony>

2024-05-24 15:38:31

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if there is anything that is more resilient than the E-Mail system of which Chatmail is an interoperable part, then we haven't heart of it :) we explained this to Russia's surveillance authority already in May 2020 ... https://delta.chat/en/2020-05-01-roskamnadzor
Fighting legally mandated client side scanning aka #chatcontrol is still the political and legal fight at hand and it's better not to loose it as it would deteriorate privacy at planetary scale.

2024-05-22 22:14:30

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thanks for clarification and all your work! Netzpolitik writes that encrypted communications might be excluded from chatcontrol in their reporting about it, but only in a side sentence. What is your interpretation?

2024-05-22 18:48:57

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It is easy to bring lots of technical arguments why #chatcontrol is a bad idea. But even if it were technically possible, it would be a catastrophic idea. No government should have an automated surveillance capability built into all private communications -- and images and videos are very much a core part of private communications. Pushing for such automated surveillance of private communications arguably surpasses Iran, Russia and other countries's control efforts.

2024-05-22 17:30:11

Sounds like a bad joke joke but the EU governing council wants to once again legislate #chatcontrol for it's 350 million citizens. According to @npub1s7d…4chv (EU parlementarian) the legislation wants to force messengers to prevent users from sending images or videos unless they agree them to be scanned, AI-analyzed and potentially reported to police. They apparently want to bring it up for a council vote in two days and get it through parliament in June. German link https://www.patrick-breyer.de/lass-dich-ueberwachen-eu-rat-will-sich-auf-chatkontrolle-mit-zustimmung-der-nutzer-einigen/

2024-05-22 07:56:40

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we appreciate your critique and just wanted to clarify (also for other readers) that delta chat is not tied to android or efoundations #mobifree effort but we choose to participate and support it, in conjunction with other interesting projects in die Foss ecosystem. Cheers.

2024-05-21 23:57:39

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even if we share some.of.your critique we are open to multiple ways of trying to weaken Google's dominance, including the #mobifree effort, not the least because we highly appreciate the work of several partners there. Delta itself is running on a wide variety of mobile and desktop platforms because our rust-core is platform agnostic. It's a situation where other messengers still strive to get to. This started with the "rustocalypse" in Kyiv 2019 https://delta.chat/en/2019-05-08-xyiv

2024-05-21 21:52:00

A well running de-googled Android system based on and running #FOSS apps? Some are skeptical about Android fundamentally, others point to the existing mass of compatible devices that could participate. Of course Chromium alone makes "de-googling" a tricky effort, as its dependencies on Google run deep. Nevertheless, we are part of the #mobifree effort officially launched today and discussed here from project partners like @npub1xhk…y0c4 @npub1dk0…k0wd @npub18ds…6490
@npub1xed…ghxk https://fosstodon.org/@microg/112480382433515629

2024-05-21 19:15:47

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no, we don't preannounce features typically but they usually show up in releases sooner or later. Webxdc and Chatmail came this way. See pinned posts.

2024-05-20 14:32:31

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are telegrams secret 1:1 chats still leaking to the cleartext network layer? Or did they finally use it on top of their custom transport encryption which is also known to have flaws? Even if they fixed it by now there are no e2ee group chats so there simply is no reasonable comparison to Signal and other messengers who offer pervasive e2ee automatically.

2024-05-20 09:19:50

While we do have criticisms of its centralized architecture and other choices we highly regard Signal for ushering in a decade of popularizing end-to-end encryption. We particularly appreciate @npub1vt7…5vdp doing excellent communication work there. It's disingenuous that tech-billionaires Musk/Dorsey fuel attacks on her and another female colleague, hinting at Telegram as a more secure messenger. Comparing security of Signal with Telegram simply results in "Type Error: incompatible arguments".

2024-05-17 15:26:53

The surprising developments in our teams happen "in between" when someone makes an "argument in code" after some inspirational chatting with others, often in cross project and cross-concern manners. Chaotic some might say, not unfittingly. Challenge is to sync it with our release scheduling and reliability discipline. There is this nice saying "you have to become disciplined to be undisciplined" which mirrors practises of how larger #ccc events are arranged in which delta chat grew up :)

2024-05-14 14:01:16

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surely, push notifications are a complex thing only arising because mobile OSes prefer to prevent apps from just sitting there, listening for network activity. https://dontkillmyapp.com/ exists for good reasons.

2024-05-14 08:45:18

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stay tuned :) but we will not compromise on reliability, efficiency and ease of use which means we tread carefully. Instead of a distributed hash table (dht) we are to use the massively scaled e-mail system for bootstrapping P2P connectivity and paradigms. Any P2P system needs a bootstrapping mechanism, if not email it would be "root" servers and they are way less federated and decentralized than email :) but more when the time comes as we prefer delivering working code not ideas.

2024-05-14 00:35:07

Often overlooked from our "but e-mail!" skeptics: Any sufficiently advanced P2P messenger will eventually re-invent a custom, partial form of e-mail ... because users want to communicate when their apps are offline or not foregrounded and active at the same time. See https://briarproject.org/download-briar-mailbox/ for a recent example.
Delta Chat goes the reverse route by providing a secure and interoperable e-mail based messaging experience and then adds P2P tech like https://webxdc.org on top.

2024-05-10 12:02:10

Did you know that Delta Chat is the only mature, cross-platform secure messaging app that does not use or need a key server?
Signal, Matrix, Proton, Whatsapp all effectively operate key servers that reveal the cryptographic identity (a very strong identifier) behind an address.
Delta Chat uses decentralized specs and protocols that reveal your cryptographic identity only to those you choose to interact with. Nothing can be publically queried.
Background link: https://delta.chat/en/help#encryption-and-security

2023-12-13 19:27:01

Today, we are unveiling chatmail services, making onboarding with #deltachat a breeze, with peace of mind.
#chatmail marks a major milestone, answering the practical question of "where can i get a deltachat-ready account" for myself and friends?
Read more on https://delta.chat/en/2023-12-13-chatmail
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/111/574/337/091/189/525/original/8823c5f6599e7264.png