gemini://gem.acdw.net:1965/page/2020-08-20-Chatting-with-email

Delta Chat is interesting. Someone (I'm guessing the developer?) thought to themselves, "Dang, all these different chat apps are annoying. There's Slack, IRC, Matrix, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, GroupMe, Kik, SMS, DMs (on multiple services), and the OG: email. What if I just made a chat app that used email on the back end?!" And that's what they did. It also has encryption and other stuff.

I used it once before a year or two ago, and I tried to use it with my wife. See, we have daily chatting email threads anyway, because we use our computers while working and the other methods -- SMS, Messenger, etc. -- are on the phone and annoying to use at work, and I don't want to install WhatsApp, which is what she uses with her family .... anyway, I thought that using the DeltaChat app would make chatting with emails easier and more streamlined. At the time, it didn't really, and she got annoyed at getting all the random small emails, so I uninstalled it.

Until a few days ago, when I joined to chat gemini with some folks. I originally used my main email account, but I decided to switch over to my Disroot account so my email doesn't get cluttered with these DeltaChat emails in the inbox. I tried filtering them, but only some were filtered. It seems like the encrypted ones don't have the X-Sender header, or whatever I was using to filter the other ones. I don't know ... I got tired of trying so I switched over. Ben was great with adding me back to the group chat, but I still got emails in Fastmail (even though I deleted my DeltaChat account on my phone).

I guess what I'm saying is, DeltaChat feels like a hack -- probably because it is. But it's a neat hack and I like the idea a lot.

The one thing I keep thinking about is the overhead of email: every chat DeltaChat sends has all these email headers. Looking at the raw text of one message, the headers are more than half of the content -- and that's with a lengthy PGP encrypted message block. It seems like a lot of overhead for short ephemeral messages, though I suppose a lot of email correspondance is similarly short.

Okay, two things: there's also the message sending limit a lot of email providers implement. Apparently Disroot is good about upping the limit for DeltaChat users, but others will have to figure it out themselves. I don't think DeltaChat would work on Migadu, for example.

Anyway that's my first thoughts using this chat app. It's a neat idea but definitely a hack. Email isn't the best technology to use for really short messages in a chat style, I don't think.

2020-08-20-Chatting-with-email

Chatting with email

my adventures (so far) with Delta Chat