Delta Chat

by AlphaWeaver • 7 years ago

141 56 7 years ago

akerl_• 7 years ago

Reading their docs, it seems like this uses Trust-on-first-use key exchange, so if there's an attacker passively observing the network at that point, they can MITM all future communications.

Also, the Autocrypt Level 1 spec, which this seems to implement, appears to be based on PGP, with the following caveat: "Sometimes Autocrypt recommends to send cleartext mail even though encryption appears technically possible."

titanomachy• 7 years ago

I don't think that's how TOFU works. Doesn't attacking it require an active attacker to substitute his own public key at the start?

e12e• 7 years ago

Yes, if the attacker is strictly passive, tofu with public key should be fine. That the attacker is strictly passive is a pretty strong assumption though!

jwalton• 7 years ago

na85• 7 years ago

Hang on, if the person you're chatting with doesn't need to install deltachat, isn't this just... Email?

fxj3• 7 years ago

In principle instant messaging is just email with a dumbed down interface.

fredley• 7 years ago

In principle, email is just exchanging TCP packets with a dumbed down interface.

fxj3• 7 years ago

I think this is the future of instant messaging. If we all would change instantly to delta.chat, whatsapp et al would go bankrupt and we would not lose a bit of security. At the moment everybody is fine with handing out their most private information to some huge corporations which already told us that we are dumb fucks. But maybe mankind deserves this.

dickeytk• 7 years ago

Delta Chat has no own servers

I'm not sure what that's trying to say but the grammar is definitely wrong.

Operyl• 7 years ago

It’s piggybacking off of IMAP/SMTP, so you use your existing email provider.

qntty• 7 years ago

Looks like the people who made this are German, it's a common mistake for German speakers. They mean "Delta Chat doesn't have their own servers".

chki• 7 years ago

I think it's fascinating that you don't understand what is meant by that sentence. I'm a native german speaker and would probably not make that mistake but I can't imagine somebody not understanding the combination of the words "own" and "servers".

antidaily• 7 years ago

Damn. I was hoping to speak with someone about my last SkyMiles statement.

Midnightas• 7 years ago

Damn, I had this idea once, shame I didn't do anything with it. This looks like something I'll actually use though!

mtgx• 7 years ago

They mention encryption on their site, but if it uses email are all text messages secure from the email provider reading them or not?

elvecinodeabajo5• 7 years ago

E2E encryption may make the messages unreadable out of the Delta client app. Specs here: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/blob/master/s...

magnetic• 7 years ago

I like this idea.

I wonder how latency impacts the "live chatting" experience.

Email protocols have specific impediments on egress and ingress: on one end to ensure that a sender isn't sending out spam (challenges, proof of work, etc), and on the other end to ensure the recipient isn't getting spam/malware/etc.

Add to that SPF, DKIM, DMARC processing along the way...

It's not uncommon to have conversations with a 3rd party along the lines of...

- Did you get my email? I just sent it a minute ago.

- No not yet. It'll come through.

...with this taking sometimes up to a minute.

We accept a certain latency with email communications, but I'm unsure that will offer a good user experience for interactive chat.

0xname• 7 years ago

While not directly comparable, text messages do often see some lag (especially when also considering something like MMS) so it could be said that there is some tolerance for latency. A more distinctive difference could be the lack of rich media functionalities (sharing GIFs, stickers, etc) that have seen popularity in most messenger apps. This seems to be a middle ground between traditional email (professional) and mobile chat (casual) which could see some use but I can't imagine how user adoption would follow

smush4• 7 years ago

Emails and SMS message seem to have similar 'delivery time ranges' to me. I send this message, and it will arrive somewhere between pseudo-instantly and take a minute.

With my conversations, it is often a minute to get users to respond if they are working on multiple IM conversations and need to finish their thought, or are otherwise doing something meaningful outside of cyberspace anyways, so the delivery time is of less importance.

Boundless speculation: whatever the difference in instant delivery of a message and the human user noting/changing gears to address it and delivery taking (in your worse case example) 1 minute, just in time for the human user to be 'ready' to receive another message is too small to be meaningful for non-techie users.

Anecdata for those users in my contacts list that are techies: after about 5 IMs, further chatting seems to organically migrate to a phone call or desktop client session (Slack/Volt/Skype/Discord) rather than the approx 3 messages every 5 minutes my cursory glance at message times in Signal shows for the non-techie users.

cmroanirgo• 7 years ago

I further like the idea in that it can expand as a product in several directions.

Eg. Also do a dns txt lookup for "chat" which can have a specialised server that the recipient is in control of (or subscribes to). It could bypass the legacy issues of email, but still provide a fallback in case the recipient uses email only.

jasonhansel• 7 years ago

One solution is to upgrade the IMAP connection to a direct TCP one, using ICE (from WebRTC). This was part of a project I helped work on: https://github.com/tkoft/GoingPostal

stevenicr2• 7 years ago

"using ICE (from WebRTC)"

Would this leak the ip addy of the sender to the receiver and people along the wires?

Each time I looked into webrtc and websockets I think, I noticed the need for a stun/turn server in order to mask sender ip addys, but don't know enough about all that atm.

lifeformed• 7 years ago

Does this create a new email in everyone's inboxes for every message? Or is it doing something else under the hood.

zikzak• 7 years ago

You'd think this would be covered in the FAQ. Maybe their client deletes the email once it is received by the app but then how do you use multiple clients at once (and so forth).

trynewideas• 7 years ago

I can make quick replies to an email from a notification, but I can't write a long email in a chat client. And my email client is more battery efficient than Delta Chat. (It's been on F-Droid a while, I've tried to use it and want to like the concept, but it ultimately shows out as pointless.)

There's no reason to run two email clients on my phone to receive the same messages.

jchw3• 7 years ago

This is cool, but probably not super practical. Gmail for example limits the number of messages you can send per day pretty strictly, so using it for messages would probably be unwise. Busy chats could probably eat the quota.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

It's 500 recipients per day. That seems adequately high.

I mean, if you have a chat with 100 participants, you're limited to sending 5 messages that day, but having such big chat rooms is not really that common, is it? And if you really have that need you can get cheap account at e.g. Fastmail and increase that to 4,000 or 8,000 recipients per day.

smush4• 7 years ago

I see where you are coming from, but I disagree re: the practicality being limited by message sending limits.

Sister comment says Gmail allows 500 messages to be sent per day. 500 messages/day sent in napkin math = ~20 messages/hour. Per https://www.textrequest.com/blog/how-many-texts-people-send-... , American adults sent 128 or less texts per day in 2018. You can send triple that number & still not hit the Gmail limit.

For other email providers, the limit is even higher. I checked for Fastmail's equivalent daily message limits, and it enables 4,000 or more per day.

For me personally, if I'm going to be doing over ~ 50 sent messages in one day, I'm going to ditch the mobile device and move to a desktop as I prefer a full-size Model M keyboard to touchscreens wherever possible. Most of my awake time is at work or home, where desktops abound.

I don't want to speak for you or others' preferences on this, as admittedly I don't text nearly as much as most of my peers, but I suspect others also at some point reach for a desktop UI, whether native (Signal), electron (Slack), or web-based (FB Messenger / WhatsApp / pick yer poison) for in-depth, non-mobile conversations.

jchw3• 7 years ago

I think the limit of 500 is only via the Gmail interface, iirc the limit for SMTP clients is 200.

redthrow• 7 years ago

So the content of email gets encrypted automatically if the other party uses Delta Chat but it's in plaintext otherwise?

I can't tell from their website if 2 people who use a Gmail account + Delta Chat reveal the content of their email to Google.

munk-a• 7 years ago

I know that naming things is hard but... the chances this isn't mistaken for being somehow related to delta airlines is nearly 0. The fact that this chat has nothing to do with delta (i.e. difference calculation) but seems to just be using delta to say "We're different" seems like an atrocious business decision.

bravoetch• 7 years ago

I love the concept of using existing protocols, but the implementation here creates a mismatch in expectation between the communicating users. I may be 'chatting' with someone that doesn't use Delta, and they just see short emails that don't conform to social norms for email content. Then they decide to cc a bunch of people into the conversation. Now what? The part of chat that I would like to see solved is end-to-end encryption for all, and interoperability between the existing protocols. This is just a shitty email client.

stevenicr2• 7 years ago

I have been hoping to see some new email clients that would auto load a feed of contacts and make the views appear similar to fbok / buddypress - have it auto load next emails and any images (if from contacts) - so an endless scroll could be - and option to reply to each post / feed item / email..

I think making the ux similar to what people are familiar with / similar to the most popular options (maybe like twitter and wechat too) -

we'd get a chance of getting people away from the walled gardens -

I'd love for new apps to not only provide that kind of ux, but also give options to send comments (and also recieve in the client and display) via other platforms like signal, matrix, activity pub, all the bridges..

It would need icons next to messages to show which portal they are coming from / going to, is it encrypted, etc.

I for one would very much like to see new viewing options for some shitty email clients.

I appreciate the home page of this delta chat is showing screen views for desktop, android, iPhone - wish all products did this.

botto• 7 years ago

So is this using COI protocol? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216077

elvecinodeabajo5• 7 years ago

As specs says it uses IMAP as Transport it's a CoI based messenger.

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/blob/master/s...

NonEUCitizen3• 7 years ago

Could be the other way around -- CoI is based on Delta Chat?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216346

Delta Chat

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