The whole value proposition of Delta Chat for me was that it gave me a chat-like interface for my personal email account, plus E2EE with anyone I could convince to use it too. No more it seems. This decision by DC devs forces me to either put up with encrypted gobbledygook in my inbox or switch to another email app.

Most of the family and friends I convinced to try DC have since uninstalled it. I have maybe one contact still using it. So I'm afraid it's the end of the road for me and DC.

(2/?)

I'm surprisingly sad about that. Delta Chat has been a regular part of my communications with family and friends since about 2020.

When I first adopted it, I managed to convince a lot of them to try it, presumably because they could use it with an existing account. I really hoped this could lead to a critical mass of usage that would allow it to displace Meta's Messenger, which is what most of them used.

(3/?)

Sadly, corporate email providers soon started taking steps that made it harder to use Delta Chat reliably with their services. If at all. One by one my family and friends stopped using it.

Meanwhile the DC team seem to have abandoned this bootstrapping strategy. In favour of improving UX for those of us with the knowledge and motivation to take extra steps to use software that respects our rights. At which point it started to lose the point of difference it had with XMPP/Matrix apps.

(4/?)

It seems that process has now come full circle. To use Delta Chat, people are expected to set up a dedicated email account for it, and connect to a specialist server running their ChatMail package or something similar. So it has no UX advantage to balance out the many disadvantages it has compared to XMPP or Matrix apps.

Thanks DC, it's been a good run. Guess I better start looking through F-Droid for another mobile email app. Any recommendations?

(5/5)

@strypey for longer there is a FAQ entry https://delta.chat/en/help#can-i-use-a-classic-email-address-with-delta-chat, and blog posts and public communication saying we are going for "dedicated" mailboxes . Today, and going forward, you can use your own email server, and many other servers, and also a growing set of chatmail relays world-wide. You can also change them later and take all contacts and chats with you.

But Delta chat as cleartext email client with a chat interface, is not the recommended setup and requires expertise.

@delta Seems like you're responding only to the first post of 5. Here's a TL;DR;

Making it awkward (if not impossible) to use DC for both classic email and E2EE chats breaks my use case. Without that, I can't see any advantage to using DC over XMPP or Matrix, and many disadvantages. I will no longer be using or recommending it. I'm sad about that, it's been a good run. Thanks for your work, and best of luck with future development : )