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E-mail compatibility releases
May 05, 2021 by bjoern
The current releases make interoperability with classic e-mail land even smoother, targeting several long-awaited things.
Rich-formatted HTML-mails
Got a train ticket? A notification from a parcel service? An invitation?
All these messages may come as rich-formatted HTML-mails, that are now displayed nicely directly inside Delta Chat 1.20.
To access them, just use the Show full message button that will be added just to the bubble whenever needed.
Mailing lists
Delta Chat 1.20 supports reading mailing lists.
Mailing lists are especially important as also “normal” mails may come as mailing lists - e.g. the mentioned notification from the parcel service is now displayed even if wrapped into a mailing list.
As sender on mailing lists may be anonymized by the mailing list software, they are marked by a leading tilde as ~Alice.
This and several other tiny things needed to be considered to make things work, so, we’re finally pretty happy to have mailing lists in - please report back if you encounter any issues, so that we can also open mailing lists for writing soon™.
Nicer handling of support addresses
Support addresses as info@example.org often expand to multiple co-worker where (at best :) one of them will come reply to you.
These replies may come from different addresses, however, are shown in the correct chat now.
Other improvements
Nearly 100 issues were targeted to improve email-comaptibility, some other highlights are:
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Messages look better if the recipient does not use Delta Chat - the subject is nicer, no unexpected avatar attached
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Better attachment handling
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Support of Outlook.com (and other providers messing up headers ;)
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Check all server-folders for new messages from time to time
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Bots also benefit from several features - e.g. they also can anonymize users and can send HTML-mails.
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Due to more senders, we added more and new colors for contact avatars
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Due to more messages overall, we speedup global search
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you can see the status (the footer) of each contact in the contact’s profile
How it works
Since the first day, Delta Chat uses the most diverse and distributed network ever existing for transporting chat messages: E-mail.
Delta Chat resists the temptation to build another cage on top of that and works well together with other providers and apps; doing some good jobs in separating chat messages from classical e-mails.
So, in general, classic e-mail works since the first day:
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You can chat with any e-mail address, there is no need that the recipient also uses Delta Chat. The recipient just receives a classic e-mail then (not only a link as some other apps do).
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To receive classic e-mails in addition to chat messages, you need to enable Settings / Chats and media / Show classic emails.
However, for both cases, due to the diversity of the mail system, in the past, there were several annoyances when it comes to detail.
As shown above, the current update targets several of these :)
Is this for everyone?
Handling e-mail in Delta Chat is only an option, you are still free to use Delta Chat as before, in combination with other e-mail clients.
We are pretty aware that the current improvements are only some steps towards mail, more to come.
However, Delta Chat is probably the best messenger for handling e-mails already today ;)
Get the updates
Check out get.delta.chat for the new versions - as always, shipping to all stores will take some time.
The versions include even more things to discover, improved notifications on iOS, voice-recording-locking on Android and much, much more.