"Tool allows stealthy tracking of #Signal and #WhatsApp users through delivery receipts"

cyberinsider.com/tool-allows-s…

Another privacy vulnerability caused by the dependency on phone numbers.

In #ArcaneChat (and other #chatmail clients like #DeltaChat) you don't need a phone number (or any private data at all!) to register, so such attacks are simply impossible, keep your family safe, join arcanechat.me

Tool allows stealthy tracking of Signal and WhatsApp users through delivery receipts

A new tool named Device Activity Tracker exposes a privacy flaw in WhatsApp and Signal that lets attackers covertly monitor user activity.

^{Alex Lekander (CyberInsider)}

#chatmail relays are recently getting more artful in their web presence 🤩 Nice examples:

darkrun.dev in Ontario, or
bloc7.icu/ in Warszawa.

We estimate there are ~4 times more relays than in the published list at chatmail.at/relays

Many relays are smaller ones, but that's fine. A 5 EUR per month VPS can go a long way (thousands or tens of thousands of monthly users). Thanks for the service to all the operators of which around 40 are in a loose group chat 💗

Your chat profile/identity: a tar file.

Your social web app: a zip file.

chatmail.at and webxdc.org are spearheading ever new and more fun ways to deny power to servers and platform billionaires.

Unlike classic email servers, #chatmail relays do not store user identities which solely live on end-user devices.There also is no encrypted value on the server like with Proton Mail or Signal. There are only relays, endless federating networks of relays to onboard safely :)

@kbruen well I guess that is a matter of opinion? because this other person is saying totally the opposite:

mastodont.cat/@spla/1156953525…

and besides that, setup is something you do only once, the real struggle comes next, I have never self-hosted matrix but see people complaining or even de-federating due to server burden, while I do host a #chatmail server with +8k users in a 5eur VPS using 1.2gb of ram and 19gb of disk, now try the same with #matrix

I am total noob self-hoster btw

@delta

in speaking with my colleagues at @delta i began to test multi-transport (multi-relay) functionality.

early testing looks very good on android, just now we wait until all client engineers bring core library into parity.

we are close to being unstoppable.

now is an amazing time to try #deltachat

interested in running #chatmail relay?

chatmail.at/ github.com/chatmail/relay

or contact me. i run several and am happy to help you onboard!

RE: chaos.social/@thefinalstrawrad…

Another nice surprise! A careful discussion and appreciation of our almost 8-year long running efforts, and its #deltachat and #chatmail artifacts. The "Signal contingency plan" comes complete with podcast, website and zine!

The Final Straw Radio (@thefinalstrawradio@chaos.social)

Attached: 1 image Our chat with Mary & Fanny, two independent technologists, on contingency for "what if Signal were blocked in the US" and their suggestion: @delta https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.

^{The Final Straw Radio (chaos.social)}

#Telegram has a nice and fast UI, granted.

But the 1 billion people using TG are at risk because of its big central database that any state security service craves for. Moreover, several anonymization proxy-bot offerings were hacked in 2024, identifying millions of users and content.

#deltachat builds anonymization directly into the app and has pervasive end-to-end encryption. #chatmail relay operators can sleep well, knowing they have nothing. Ergo, E2EE is good for any operators sleep! :)

#chatmail does secure email federation that works. Using lean "relay" servers that enforce metadata-minimized end-to-end encryption.

There is a new little tool that checks whether two relays are interacting well for messaging, and how fast. You need a terminal window and be able to execute:

pip install cmping

you can then run for example:

cmping mailchat.pl nine.testrun.org

to perform a "ping" test for e2ee-messaging. Also see chatmail.at/relays

github.com/chatmail/cmping/

oh wait there's more?

Why isn't any of this in the docs?

#Deltachat #Chatmail

The #chatmail #rust core is the base infrastructure library used by all apps and bots. It contains all networking, encryption, email processing and implements all the relevant IETF email standards. It's a single central development place with which the whole ecosystem of clients and bots can upgrade consistently.

We are constantly trying to remove code, and to cleanup things. That's a must to keep a 8-year long evolved code base agile and adaptable. Key insight: The best code is no code ;)

Any data that is collected on servers will eventually leak or be abused otherwise.

By design, no one can enumerate #deltachat profiles which are private and not published on any server. Conversely, #chatmail relays do not see or collect private data or metadata.

But wait, there is more :)

We are currently evolving end-to-end security protocols and UX to **survive an attacker fully taking over a server**. The attacker shall not even be able to message users, let alone impersonate anyone.

While #cloudflare US-east1 is busy fixing a good part of the Internet, parts of Matrix/Element, X etc down, good old decentralized #chatmail continues unimpeded and without degradation :)

In other news, there is a new #freebsd community maintained ❤️ #deltachat desktop install:

pkg install deltachat-desktop

thanks @feld and others!

#chatmail might be a new way to deliver email but it's not a new way to deliver mail :)

"Poste restante" or "general delivery" or "waiting mail" is a mode where one can send a message to a name or, in some countries, pseudonym, @ a post office address and then someone else can come and get it, showing their name or pseudonym (passphrase). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poste_re…

Curious, which of you know/have used the poste restante mode of delivering postal mail at one point in your life?

• used "poste restante" delivery multiple times (6%, 14 votes)
• Used poste restante once (3%, 8 votes)
• Heard of it but didn't use (27%, 65 votes)
• Never heart of it. (62%, 146 votes)

this is not your grandfather's twitter bootstrap framework.

finalizing design for #deltachat #chatmail system. by hackers for hackers.

Denmark and other EU governments still pursue #chatcontrol.

They still want to permanently legalize client-side scanning but postponed making it mandatory.

They also want to increase age-verification controls which risk to ruin what little is left of privacy in current digital spaces, taken hostage already by US corps.

Ourselves? We double down on providing the most private, reliable and fun messaging experience, with a growing federating #chatmail relay network across the globe.

#deltachat is a private messaging app. It'd be easy enough to offer various public groups to boost onboarding, and let everyone play. But one would land in a large group that isn't very private, with lots of needs for moderation tooling, troll handling and other social-media issues. Not our current cup of tea.

We are grateful for the many folks here onboarding their families, projects or friends, founding special-interest chats, setting up #chatmail relays etc. This is wonderful, cheers!

Many experts caught up in the past crypto/decentralization discourse fail to recognize one key innovation area of #deltachat and #chatmail efforts:

A user interface (UI) and experience (UX) that mimicks and closely resembles Whatsapp and Telegram ... who both have a central cleartext database of identities, social graphs and, in the case of Telegram, also messages and media, of billions of users!

We prefer to ground every discussion in UX/UI terms and measure security by outcomes for users.

we hear you but it's the truth: by onboarding to #deltachat today you are diving into an experimental testrun of "the future of email" , also known as #chatmail chatmail.at

Finally we, as app distributors, want to fully disentangle from any "default" server. Testrun will become history :)

1) there are bridges ("matterdelta") which provide interop with Matrix, XMPP, Telegrram, ssh and anything that Matterbridge provides. It doesn't preserve end-to-end encryption and so bridging bot choice is tricky.

2) There are growing efforts around 3rd party #chatmail clients chatmail.at/clients. Interoperability is "free" between all chatmail clients (#deltachat being the prominent one). Unlike #Signal we welcome third parties to the party :)

Chatmail: Clients

Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!

^chatmail.at

Abrimos un canal de Puerto Rico en Deltachat para probar las aplicaciones.

Si estás en boriken.social, aparecerá el enlace en un anuncio arriba.

Si no lo estás, escribeme un DM y te invito.

#PuertoRico #BorikenSocial #MastodonPR #Deltachat #chatmail

Signal's president claimed it takes billions to replicate the availability and reliability of "hyperscalers" (AWS/Google/Microsoft/Cloudfare) that Signal uses.

#chatmail and #deltachat are about disproving this claim by

1) making relays super cheap (DONE)

2) enabling chat profiles to use multiple relays redundantly (WIP)

3) distributing relay knowledge among chatters (TBD).

Fat servers, corporate overlords and billionaires: not needed and better to not exist for a convivial e2ee future :)

quick heads up. Our impressions: #matrix is going strong with public sector entities, and it's where most dynamics happened at the conf.

We are rather focused on private and resilient messaging where servers don't play a big role; as we want #chatmail relays to be dirt cheap to operate, no pro version needed. Our focus is on informal usage, groups, family, friends, affinity or interest groups, whereas matrix is increasingly focusing on corporate/ organizational use cases. YMMV

Our project is one of constant exit planning and circumvention considerations ... as times and tech are getting more shitty.

We don't bet on a single basket, and not a single state or jurisdiction, and certainly not AWS/Google/Microsoft US clouds which run #Signal servers.

No single hoster, platform or language (we do a lot of Rust, granted) and no single device or vendor. At #chatmail protocol levels we regard nothing as holy, and look for simplicity and robustness, and convivial community 🖤

Believe it or not: #deltachat is growing audio/video calls starting with the currently rolling 2.22 releases ... A few people already had two hour long stable calls :)

Calls are an experimental option while we continue to work on reliability, UX/UI revisions, and configuration of TURN servers on #chatmail relays and in clients.

We want calls to reliably work across all major platforms, networks and phones, including #UbuntuTouch

Feedback and debugging happens at support.delta.chat/t/help-test…

Help testing upcoming Delta Chat release with calls 📞!

Всем привет! Возможно ли сделать звонок, если использовать только классические сервера электронной почты? Мои попытки позвонить закончились неудачно - сам вызов проходит, но ни звука, ни видео.

^Delta.Chat

Good news! It's getting harder to keep track of new #chatmail relays :)

Recently several public relays were added to the chatmail.at/relays list, in Warsaw, Helsinki, Romania and Barcelona.🧡

If you have #deltachat installed on mobile, you can go to any chatmail relay website in the list and click on a link there to create a chat profile.

It's wonderful to hear about collectives setting up chat infrastructure like the recent xat.fedi.cat from @fedicat and @eXOfasia

Chatmail: Relays

Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!

^chatmail.at

I've been on the hunt for some accessible, easily self-hosted (on prem or datacenter) chat solution for a while now, and I've been looking very closely at deltachat/chatmail.

Not gonna lie, the fact that just uses mature SMTP facilities for transport is making me weirdly aroused.

If anyone has experience running their own chatmail server or just using deltachat in general, I'd be glad to hear from you.

#DeltaChat #ChatMail #SelfHosted #HomeLab

Not taking Venture Capital money means:

- No pressure to maximize monetization of usage (for every million of VC funding you need to find ~100+ Million in value later).

- No prioritization of growing fast with PR campaigns that promise the moon and stumble on the ground

- No billionaire who ultimately profits

Instead, we seek public funding and private contributions for #chatmail #deltachat and #webxdc developments.

Thanks to everyone who is helping and already test-driving things :)