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 I get all your moves. Crypto identity, using servers as dumbest possible routers as possible.
But I regret the idea of moving from using gmail servers as a pure parasite, easy set up, use your current login/pass to having to buy a DNS, having to buy a VPS and install a server. It's a very very high friction.
Maybe using an overlay network like yggdrasil (or tor) would ease that, no DNS to set up, only a server to boot.