Strypey
"The option “Move automatically to DeltaChat Folder” as well as other legacy options will be removed in the next weeks.
...
Only if you share the same email address for chatting and classic usage, which is discouraged since some time, the encrypted messages in the Inbox may be annoying."
https://delta.chat/en/legacy-move
This is news to me @delta.
(1/?)
Strypey
The whole value proposition of Delta Chat for me was that it gave me a chat-like interface for my personal email account, plus E2EE with anyone I could convince to use it too. No more it seems. This decision by DC devs forces me to either put up with encrypted gobbledygook in my inbox or switch to another email app.
Most of the family and friends I convinced to try DC have since uninstalled it. I have maybe one contact still using it. So I'm afraid it's the end of the road for me and DC.
(2/?)
clacke
@strypey Delta Chat just distanced itself even further from email+delta users.
The latest update on my phone started reading non-chat messages, which there used to be an option not to do.
I went back to the 2026-06-05 version, the oldest on F-Droid main. Not old enough to have the option. I will do some further version spelunking before I drop it entirely and tell dad to install Signal instead.
clacke
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
clacke
Strypey
@clacke I'm really pissed off with these decisions breaking my use case. When I have the spoons, I'm just going to set up a standard email client, and get anyone who is willing to install an E2EE chat app to use XMPP or Matrix.
But honestly, I'm really starting to understand why most people just surrender to the status quo. The admin involved in evaluating and setting up replacements is already high, and then every now and then stuff like this happens.
clacke
Ok, from release notes, 2.49.0 is the last one that has all the settings to coexist with email.
It doesn't seem the F-Droid Archive has any old versions of Delta (main F-Droid has only back to 2.51.0), and if I get the APK from Delta's github, then it's a new signature and I need to migrate my data. This is a weekend project.
I'll tell dad not to upgrade his Delta.
clacke
@deutrino @strypey When "is it this or is it this", it's always both. 😊
If the edge cases were easy to compartmentalize, I expect they would have kept them in ... and if keeping the non-Chatmail backwards compatibility were a top priority, effort would have been made to *make* them easy to compartmentalize.
As for me, I'm not interacting with anyone outside my family and my self-chats with grocery lists and body weight tracking, so for me it will make sense to stay forever on the January 2026 version until something breaks horribly.
deutrino
@strypey @clacke this, and there were way too many edge-case behaviors with anything not Chatmail.
Strypey
@clacke The impression I get is that the changes were made to discourage the 'Delta Chat as email client with optional E2EE chat' use case, in favour of the 'all chatmail, all the time' use case. But you could be right.
clacke
@strypey Nice separation between UI, business logic and technical code is a good thing, factoring that technical code in a way that separates concerns from each other is even better.
It's what we're supposed to be doing, but live code we see out there is seldom structured to that level.
I haven't seen the Delta code, it might be glorious. I'm just saying it might not be, in which case maintaining a soft fork would be hard work.
And I'm to a degree making the assumption that they would have kept the backward-compatibility in, if it were easy to maintain.
Strypey
@clacke Is this a good argument for cleanly separating backend code from interface code and having them talk to each other through a documented API? Seems like it is to me, but I'm aware that's a rank amateur's hot take.
clacke
@strypey Yeah, hypothetically a soft fork that just reinstates those two options wouldn't be a heavy thing to maintain.
But it might also be the case that they removed them because the removal simplifies code all over the place and allows for some rewrites.
Strypey
@clacke How much work would it be to soft fork Delta Chat, and maintain a version with an interface based on the classic UX?
2 options come to mind;
1) maintain a patch-set that mods the interface code in each new version of DC to create releases of the fork
2) start with the version just before it started downgrading the email client use case. Backport any critical security patches. Release. Rinse, repeat, very time a new DC version comes out.
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