Our strong focus on end to end encryption and zero metadata does mean that one of the original project notions of "you can use delta chat as a lightweight cleartext email client and your contacts don't need to care" was deprioritized since some time now and remains available rather for specialists only. It used to be encrypted mail that was hard to do and only for experts. Delta kind of reversed this. Now it's hard to do cleartext. But you can self host your mailbox addresses. No changes there!

@delta well, it gets increasingly pointless/annoying to "self host your mailbox addresses" :)

There were two main points to do that:

- custom, easy to use and recognizable identity so you could say: "hey, message me at [email protected]".

- being able to reuse the same identity for both mail, DC and maybe other services like XMPP.

There are plenty of messengers with QR-codes and long weird links but these things scare people. They are not very human.

@shuro sure, email addresses as human recognizable handles are nice! We do have discussions to re-introduce email addresses for this use (tell someone your contact address and that's it, no QRs, weird links etc.) but it will be about establishing end-to-end encryption. It's not a current prio but it's definitely something that we can think about and do. FWIW https://securejoin.delta.chat already implements automatic secure hand-shaking for establishing E2EE.
SecureJoin: Protecting chat messaging against network adversaries — SecureJoin 0.20.0 documentation

@delta @shuro Ich habe bessere Erfahrungen mit "Kontaktwörtern". Die sind so einfach, dass sie zu einfach sind. Hinter einem Kontaktwort kann sich auch z. B. ein Invitelink verstecken...