Notices by Delta Chat (delta@chaos.social)

@innocentzero @woof https://chatmail.at is not traditional email .... It even can use http to transport messages between servers these days, and enforces e2ee messages across the federated "relay" network. In #chatmail, servers have no "accounts" or any private data, and they are also not a source of "identity" which only lives on your device(s), and can make use of multiple and changing relays for messages transport. But no discussion needed if you prefer to exclude it out of hand. Cheers.

The tale of "convenience" is a bit of a trick. A lot of corporate provided services maybe were somewhat convenient a decade ago, but they are now increasingly authoritarian, and people tend to ignore how much time they steal.

Total number of hours spent solving captchas or consent screens with #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc apps: 0 (zero). Nada. Zilch.

Compare with the estimated 819 million hours which humans spent with Google's recaptcha alone https://boingboing.net/2025/02/07/recaptcha-819-million-hours-of-wasted-human-time-and-billions-of-dollars-google-profit.html

We don't think any institution or state has the right to prevent families and friends from private chatting, physically or digitally. But the Cyber Authority China (CaC) seems to take offense:

- they made Apple remove #deltachat iOS for mainland china

- their great firewall appears to block some #chatmail relays

- if you ask DeepSeek directly about Delta Chat, it doesn't want to talk

It's pretty sad, really. Everybody on this planet needs, and has a human right to private communication.

Congrats to @protonprivacy for beating us on introducing Post-Quantum Cryptography into mail messaging!

No worries. We'll implement https://autocrypt2.org which additionally offers reliable deletion / forward secrecy during 2026 :)

We are working with Proton cryptographers on OpenPGP specifications, and they are now moving towards using @rpgp , the end-to-end encryption we are using.

Everything will be based on RFC9580 (#OpenPGP v6) ... the eocsystem is moving :)

https://proton.me/blog/introducing-post-quantum-encryption

RE: https://chaos.social/@delta/116505223145222985

All of the advances in #deltachat apps and the growth of the #chatmail relay network, wouldn't be possible without public funds and private donations, an estimated 800K EUR in 2026 ❤️ money goes to ~16 FOSS contributors with no money left for president, board or director salaries 🖤

Signal uses >50 Million per year, Telegram and Whatsapp 100's Millions, and they are all not building permission-free decentralized chat infra and apps, let alone secure mini app ecosystems https://webxdc.org

We’ve been busy building and releasing but it’s high time to share some major news: @sovtechfund is investing nearly €500K into #chatmail

This 18-month commitment supports chatmail maintainers keeping the core infrastructure secure and evolving, on top of which several apps are built (but not STF funded):

#DeltaChat
@arcanechat
@deltatouch
Parla on Gnome

A huge thank you to the Sovereign Tech Fund for investing in open, secure and decentralized communication!

https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/chatmail

"it's always the receiver that determines the meaning of a message" is a famous opening quote at the first symposium on self organizing systems in Chicago, 1959. This and many other findings from those circles re-appear in our day to day discussions.

We are doing next steps towards automating planet-wide decentralized onboarding, including in Internet islands, without resorting to a central list of relays. Good news: we have now officially lost track of even the number of existing relays 😂

Making sure that deleted messages are actually deleted and unrecoverable is more involved than most folks think. The FBI could recently recover deleted Signal messages from an iOS phone because the notifications you see on your phone were stored in an extra database. Apple has now fixed this, also making #deltachat iOS users safer. Few know that so called "forward secrecy" is all about deleted messages becoming unrecoverable, see https://autocrypt2.org for our plans
https://www.heise.de/en/news/FBI-extraction-of-deleted-Signal-messages-Apple-secures-iPhones-better-11269038.html

#deltachat user profiles are private and invisible to the public. No one can discover you, or your children, via phone numbers or any other public handle. Chat profiles exist only on user devices. No PIN and no "SMS verification code" ever asked or needed.

The lack of "public discovery" also means you don't auto-discover others via phone numbers or other public handles. Getting in contact with others is "opt in": you scan a QR code or click an invite link to join a group or open a chat.

@mtrigo it's usually better to find a phone-wide solution to protecting individual app access. Moreover, there are many real-world threats where an app lock does not help at all, unfortunately. FWIW you can backup your account to a file, store it remotely, delete Delta Chat, and and re-instate it all later when needed and safe again. To discuss this more in depth, it's better to move to the https://support.delta.chat

This morning nine.testrun.org was briefly unavailable, some network problem. A good time to remind everyone to add a second relay to your #deltachat app:

1. Go to https://chatmail.at/relays randomly choose one of the listed relay pages and copy the invitation code to your clipboard

2. In delta chat settings go to advanced/relays and tap "add relay" and paste the invitation code

3. That's it.

If one relay is unavailable you still can receive and send messages.
https://delta.chat/en/2026-03-31-zero#maximizing-availability-and-resilience-through-multi-path-delivery

What if all public funding and all private donations to our efforts stop tomorrow?

Users should be fine for years thanks to the wonderful world-wide community of #chatmail relay operators 💜 Relays are dirt cheap to run. Also, our developments are much cheaper and less complex compared to what we know from comparable efforts.

No worries though!

We currently have moneys to help sustain ~15 contributors, with a sum similar to what other projects pay for their foundation president/CEO alone :)

@rakoo no, user numbers are getting.increasingly unknown even to us. We tried to express this. That more people are joining the fun and contributing in various ways, is what we experience and appreciate. All three key efforts,#chatmail #deltachat and #webxdc are community efforts.

@tchambers @nigelharpur thanks for the praise, much appreciated. we are indeed constantly working to improve and refine UX. We hear you but need to work with 1/100th of signal resources. Our last release contained two big cryptographic and network layer improvements but then also a lot of UI goodies. In this section, in particular, we try to remind the crypto/network enthusiasts among us about the importance of user interfacing https://delta.chat/en/2026-03-31-zero#at-risk-user-needs-1-availability-2-telegram-3-security

#deltachat contributors range from age 16 to 65, spanning diverse genders and even more countries and cultures. We have many discussions, and also conflicts but we usually don't carry those out in big public groups but rather go for 1:1s and generally small-group discussions. There is no central assembly or board that decides everything. It's more chaotic and admittedly hard to get an overview on, but thats' also how the yearly #CCC congress comes about, which many of us regularly attend.

After three intense months of work from more than a dozen contributors, #deltachat 2.48 releases are rolling. Maybe the most feature-packed releases ever?

- "zero metadata" messaging

- native Audio/Video calls on Android and iOS, as well as UbuntuTouch

- Group and Channel descriptions

- A new background audio player

- Revamped Download-on-Demand

and, last but not least, the long-awaited next-generation of messaging resiliency through "multi-path" routing ....

https://delta.chat/en/2026-03-31-zero

@hellomiakoda which platform? And which version of delta (settings or about shows it)

@hellomiakoda in settings -notifications there are options to enable sound. If it is enabled but no sound arrives it is a bug that needs fixing.

Fun funding fact: If we had 10 times more money to develop #deltachat , the #chatmail relay network and the #webxdc secure mini app ecosystem, we would still have ten times less than what signal has (let alone Whatsapp or telegram). But we don't want to increase nudging people for donations, as we have many users who don't even have a legal way to send us money, let alone the means. It is a special kind of reward that delta works where most if not all other messengers fail to work for users.

@ahalam all the mentioned metadata in the top post resides in the encrypted parts of messages. The server does not see group descriptions, names, avatars etc. We'll soon do a blog post on this and recent advances to "zero metadata" operations, stay tuned :)