Comment by rpdillon
11 hours ago
I'm shouting into the wind here a fair amount, but I just discovered DeltaChat and ArcaneChat. ArcaneChat is available only on Android, but DeltaChat is available on iOS and uses chatmail relays. My family has found it to be super useful and effective. I don't think it's viable to convert everybody in my social circle, but I've been very happy with the apps and attachments, notifications, and general performance.
I'm considering running my own chatmail relay, although I haven't tried that yet.
DeltaChat was much more useful when it worked with any email server and didn't need its own special kind of server. We have plenty of messengers that use their own servers, like matrix, XMPP, and simplex.
Didn't know they stopped working with regular email servers, that is a huge letdown. I'm guessing this was quite recent?
That was their one big plus and while I avoided it because of PGP, this means that it really has no upside over XMPP for me.
I appreciate the simplicity of hosting ChatMail versus a regular mail server. It's simpler, lighter weight, and better suited for the chat use case. It's basically the ideal messaging platform for my needs.
It defeats the selling point of DeltaChat. You may as well use XMPP or Matrix.
I use DeltaChat just by myself to share things between devices. Not really the intended purpose but it's good enough for me!