Delta Chat: A free, private, no-signup, decentralized WhatsApp alternative

delta.chat

3 points·alessivs··4 comments

This looks very good, but I'm not sure piggybacking on email is a good idea, considering the amount of metadata exposed by email headers that cannot be encrypted and are easy to monitor by listening in on SMTP port 25. Not to mention attachments which are likely not encrypted but just encoded in base64.

And e-mail as a base for instant messaging is not a great idea, as SMTP is not an instant protocol. Sure, most of the time it's fast, but doesn't guarantee speedy delivery at all, and timeout and redelivery timers are quite big.

> I'm not sure piggybacking on email is a good idea, considering the amount of metadata exposed by email headers

Yes, and also size of the messages. It's really easy to tell if you sent a suspect file at a specific time to somebody by only looking at the message size, which in addition to being archived somewhere, can probably be isolated from other outgoing traffic and matched against.

I wouldn't use it for top class comms, but it's worlds apart from WhatsApp, and by leveraging AutoCrypt it is so easy for non-geeks.

> Not to mention attachments which are likely not encrypted but just encoded in base64

PGP messages attached to emails where possible.

I've been using DeltaChat for quite a while, and it works like a charm.

At one point I had to switch email provider, though: I had joined a small group chat (~10 participants) in DeltaChat, and although we didn't chat a lot, the number of emails and receipt-requests (and RR returns) hit the max number of outgoing emails per day.

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