Post by @delta@chaos.social

Our blog was quiet for over half a year, but we're back, and you get three blog posts for the price of one: pinned messages, Liquid Glass on iOS, in-app updates for the Android APK, decentralized onboarding across community relays, and a first look at what's coming next, including the end of unencrypted email, and the reasoning behind it.

https://delta.chat/en/2026-11-07-pin-messages-and-multi-relay-onboarding

#deltachat #chatmail #webxdc

Delta Chat: Pinned messages, Liquid Glass, resilient decentralized onboarding and security-hardening efforts

Announcement time! This blog has been quiet for over half a year, but we continuously released new app versions throughout. Please get ready for enough news to fill three separate posts: new user-v...

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Delta Chat

#webxdc #chatmail #deltachat

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Adam Lein

@Adam@social.lein.us 2 days ago

@delta That sucks. The biggest/only selling point for Delta Chat was that it could gracefully degrade for compatibility with literally 100% of the internet connected population.

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social yesterday

@Adam Most if not all fresh onboarding with Delta happens without knowing there are IETF email protocols behind the 600+ federated relay network, compatible to many classic email providers and server. Delta Chat in the initial years tried to be also a reasonable email client, but that always was very limited compared to regular email clients. Thanks for your support during those years, and sorry it's dissapointing for you to see delta fully focusing on security/decentralized messaging now.

Adam Lein

@Adam@social.lein.us 23 hr. ago

@delta Focusing on decentralization and security is great, but it doesn't do any good if you cut people off from the rest of the world. I thought DC was following the internet's "progressive enhancement" methodology in order to give the entire SMTP communications ecosystem a way to modernize security & capabilities. That's what the world really needs. Or is that still possible, but you're cutting out all the other servers/clients before they can catch up?

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 12 hr. ago

@Adam Most people in the last 2 years onboarded on one of the many relays which enforce end-to-end encryption already. Others use their own mail server and that works well, as they can relax rate limits as needed.

Nothing is taken away from interoperability between mail servers.

Delta remains a messaging solution that allows IETF standard compliant server implementations to fully participate. We ceased to advertise delta as plaintext email client starting 2 years ago.

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Slumbering Cat Productions

@slumberingcat@calckey.world 4 days ago

@delta@chaos.social For context, I'm in the middle of writing a big deep dive on email and the various practices to reduce lock-in. (If you or anyone reading have any opinions I'd love to hear them). I've been a fan of Delta Chat for a while so I thought it would be fun to include an "Instant Messaging with Email" section.

I took your post as an opportunity to try Delta Chat <-> Encrypted Email communication. While I only got it half working in the end, I still saw the potential as a bridge while contacts haven't moved over. That said, it would've just been quicker to set up a DC account instead of messing with keys (the email clients I tried couldn't get the keys from the vcard) :p.

From what I can gather the email ecosystem's asymmetry in Autocrypt implementation is causing increased load on folk in this case.

Some questions:

What's the ideal DC<->Encrypted Email communication look like to you?
Do you have any plans to improve that experience?
Is it even a focus?
Is there anything you'd like to see the wider email ecosystem working towards to reduce friction with delta chat?
And do you have recommendations for providers/services that work out of the box so to speak with Delta Chat?

Feel free to throw whatever you have at me, the more info the better :). Thanks in advance.

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 3 days ago

@slumberingcat Unfortunately, most if not all encrypting email clients are complicated to use, and few of them have a strong focus on making encryption easy. Vcards are currently the best interoperability bet, and at least ProtonMail should produce and ingest interoperable VCards. We haven't tested that lately, though. Providers: many work quite easily but they often have rate limits and anti-spam measures, and so relays on e.g. https://chatmail.at/relays are the easier choice.

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!

deutrino

@deutrino@mstdn.io 4 days ago

paging @strypey, see above @delta

winduptoy

@winduptoy@merveilles.town 4 days ago

@delta thanks for the update! amazing work!

I've got a lot of friends and family on Delta Chat. Their profiles were created over the past few years meaning they only have the nine.testrun.org relay configured. None of them are technical, so explaining relays, servers, and profiles is not possible. Have you considered the possibility of auto-upgrading existing profiles that only have nine.testrun.org to add a few more relays?

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 4 days ago

@winduptoy and thanks a lot for the praise and we are happy it works well for you. Are your friends and family also using mini-apps if we may ask?

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 4 days ago

@winduptoy Yes, it is planned, likely for the next release: https://github.com/chatmail/core/pull/8877

GitHub

feat: If the only transport is nine, fill up to 3 relays by enabling autorelay by Hocuri · Pull Request #8877 · chatmail/core

If the user has only one transport, and it's on nine.testrun.org, then most likely they used automatic onboarding and do not really care about their transports. In order for these users to bene...

Ben

@ben@kwiecien.us 4 days ago

@delta It sort of sounds like classic e-mail is done for!

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 4 days ago

@ben If you mean plaintext/cleartext email with "classic email" then yes. You can very well use classic email server setups or providers with Delta Chat. But it will soon never download any unencrypted message, and never produce one. So you can't use it for doing cleartext/plaintext email.

Sébastien Marty

@sm@piaille.fr 4 days ago

@delta Getting better and better. Keep up the good work!

MΛYΛ

@maya@gs.lexinova.eu 4 days ago

@delta about : It learns about new versions from the community chatmail relays it already uses.

what does that mean exactly ? also does it "download it here too" or use github ?

(i ask because i would not want to be took back onto a US server for update.

Thanks

Delta Chat

@delta@chaos.social 4 days ago

@maya Currently, Delta Chat Android learns from chatmail relays about the availability of new releases, but the release APK is hosted on download.delta.chat and/or github releases. So if you are concerned, then better just take it as a hint, and find an APK in a different way. We might later evolve to let relays host most recent APKs but that requires some discussion with #chatmail community operators first.