The easiest way to install chatmail server is a small project written by a single person, meanwhile the #deltachat official server installation process is cluster of unintelligible documentation and a docker image that need multiple commands to setup properly.
How does that one dev build a better hosting experience than a company?
maybe ask @adbenitez to get the full marketing-blurb :) but as far as we understood: there are more services integrated like a set of chat bots and UX/UI tweaks/improvements/mods that may or may not make their way to the mainline #deltachat apps sometime.
Signal just released a "poll" feature with great fanfare, while all #deltachat apps already integrated a full suite of chat-shared apps, checklists, polls, shopping lists, calendar, editor + tons of games.
Better, anyone can create new apps, eg as github/codeberg forks from existing apps, and post it to their chats for instant deployment. No need to ask for permission, register an account, and no hosting or DNS: actually "server-less" and fully end-to-end encrypted :)
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:
Hi, can you help: It seems that #deltachat notification system goes to "sleep" from time to time in android (Google Pixel 6a) so that I don't receive push notifications until I open the app. I haven't yet figured out the mechanism in this problem. I have set notification priority to max. It seems that I need to activate Background Connection from notification settings for things to work. But it shouldn't be necessary nowadays since Google push notifications should do the trick..?
We were surprised to hear today that Forbes.ru (a subsidiary of the global Forbes brand it seems) recently published an article quoting an expert recommending to use #deltachat on the backdrop of restrictions of Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord and Viber in Russian networks.
На фоне учащающейся недоступности самых популярных у россиян мессенджеров Forbes опросил экспертов, чем их можно заменить. Они советуют использовать мессенджеры, поддерживающие сквозное шифрование и децентрализованное хранение данных. А также установ
#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!
@ferrex you are right. #Olvid is pretty well done regarding UX for boarding and getting in contact, largely similar to how #deltachat does onboarding, with interesting differences. Something to learn from (we think in bot directions). Thanks for pointing this out to us! Do you happen to know any olvid people in the fediverse? It's not an open source project and work with a central transport server, no federation etc, but still interesting to engage with from a UX standpoint.
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.
What if a state tries to mandate us as #deltachat app devs/distributors to shut down a chat profile?
Nothing. It can't be done.
We have no list of chat identities, have no handle or data about them, and don't mediate the message transfer.
However, EU #Chatcontrol politicians and Russian authorities would want us to insert backdoors into our FOSS code. But that is nothing than can happen overnight, and we are fine with friendly forks already. Resilient private internet communication ftw :)
@lexinova @upofadown FWIW there are some non-electron clients chatmail.at/clients and an upcoming post about an experimental Tauri one. The current #deltachat desktop electron-based client tries to both size-bloat/ram wise do better, and also e.g. bars the frontend rendering process from doing any Internet connections which are purely done via the Rust core library, for all #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!
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 #chatmailchatmail.at
Finally we, as app distributors, want to fully disentangle from any "default" server. Testrun will become history :)
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!
I agree. @delta did a great job with this UX. Built upon the email protocol (with e2ee encryption added) they are just as decentralized and federated as email, or for that matter Mastodon. They are a great deal MORE decentralized than Signal or say, BlueSky now. But their UX did an excellent job "hiding" the complexity. Others decentralized/federated platforms should learn from this example! #deltachat chaos.social/@delta/1154793927…
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 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!
I agree, #Deltachat is awesome for superfast account creation, then sharing the account by QR code. No password set or stored, no phone number or email given, no password manager grumbled about necessitating
@delta@chaos.social desktop Linux client installed from an official arch repo for some reason doesn't work on my Arch Linux with Wayland and Sway installed. After the launching through wmenu nothing happens. When launching through a terminal emulator I got an error:
[28650:1101/162426.452376:ERROR:ui/ozone/platform/x11/ozone_platform_x11.cc:250] Missing X server or $DISPLAY
[28650:1101/162426.452426:ERROR:ui/aura/env.cc:257] The platform failed to initialize. Exiting.
SolutionLaunch Delta Chat client by the following command:
Hey @delta! Reading this delta.chat/en/2025-05-22-brows… got me thinking. I live in Firefox but miss Chrome’s one-click “Install PWA as app”. What about a Tauri-based helper + a Firefox extension that wraps a PWA into a desktop app in one step? Hosting stays light: the PWA is cached; relays/self-hosted instances can serve the client. Keeps control with admins. Interested? 👍🏻
As part of the project to port Delta Chat Desktop from Electron to Tauri1, we’ll showcase a setup where our Desktop app runs in Firefox and does not depend on Electron or Chromium anymore. This vid...
We also just reposted his invitation to a Puerto Rico group, because we think the way this group is instigated is exactly right: ask for people to drop into a DM, or like with the borken.social Fediverse instance: show an invite link only for authenticated users 🎯
Non-public invites maintain some privacy and sense of joiners and brings e2ee messaging to instance communities.
Ja sé que tots sou molt racionals, però en el #DeltaChat, quan entres dins dels grups, en el fons de pantalla, a part de clar/obscur podria existir també la opció d'insertar una imatge des de la teva galeria, per canviar el fons?
Countering toxicity and fake takes is not just a technical question (moderation, admins etc) but one of social curation both collectively and privately: which people and groups do you/we trust for what. No tool can automate that.
#deltachat is for private e2ee messaging and mutually curated group chats, and not random social media propelled onboarding. We are with #Signal here and not with #simplex and #matrix who offer public anonymous discovery of large chat groups with lots of unknown folks.
thanks for trying and telling about your experiences!
We generally recommend to use #deltachat for private chatting and your "300 people group" does not sound quite like that. Delta Chat is not geared and not well suited for groups of hundreds of people, today. Are the issues you noted related to such larger groups? If not, would you mind sharing a few, maybe on the support.delta.chat forum?
Today, we were nicely surprised by @gianmarcogg03 with a new comprehensive (italian) #deltachat introduction video, going through initial setup, groups and chatting, second device setup, #webxdc apps, bots, calls and playing Quake -- all the nice things you can do these days :)
Ho fatto un tutorial su @delta@chaos.social, un sistema di messaggistica istantanea libero e privato basato sulle e-mail, ma con un'esperienza utente molto simile a WhatsApp, se non migliore.
:peertube: PeerTube: https://videos.gianmarco.
...but there is one thing that #Deltachat does not provide while it works perfectly fine with #Signal ... the desktop client that works on #FreeBSD and is available in #FreeBSD pkg(8) packages.
The 'web' approach (such as web.whatsapp.com for WhatsApp) would also satisfy my needs - I can use a client in the browser - but if there is no 'native' client and no browser client option for #FreeBSD - that means total NO-GO for me.
