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COI – Chat Over IMAP

coi-dev.org

121–130 of 259 posts

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#121

Hey everyone. I don't want to start a debate or anything, I'm just looking for a privacy concerned chat service that I can easily teach my fiance to sign up for and use. She gave up on Pidgin, and I would appreciate any pros/cons for your favorite service of this kind. Thank you in advance!

Signal is probably the best combination of easy-to-use/secure.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#122
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Matrix last month. It's neat, but slow and a little buggy. Recommending it to anyone other than a Matrix developer right now seems a bit of a stretch.

Not to mention that it's just re-solving all the same problems other messaging protocols (XMPP, IRC, etc.) spent time solving 10+ years ago. I always feel that the Matrix organization is a bit disingenuous. Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model), but if they really just wanted to connect all the other chat protocols and make sure eve…

> Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model),

I don't see a clear relationship between the sentence and its parenthetical.

I don't know about Matrix' funding model. But I do know Signal, for example, isn't developed by a recognized standards body. What can I infer from that about the sustainability of its long-term funding?

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#123

Hey everyone. I don't want to start a debate or anything, I'm just looking for a privacy concerned chat service that I can easily teach my fiance to sign up for and use. She gave up on Pidgin, and I would appreciate any pros/cons for your favorite service of this kind. Thank you in advance!

I would use Signal, quite simple and privacy focused.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#124
post #10

"Last but not least, every COI client app can offer a variety of end to end encryption options to keep your communication absolutely private." The fact I had to read quite so far down the page to find this snippet emphasises to me how unimportant the developers of this protocol see E2E encryption to be :( And leaving it to the client seems like a terrible idea, especially if there are options, as then surely it will…

The draft spec available in the confluence wiki says the following:

>A COI-compliant client MAY support the Autocrypt standard to ease end to end encryption scenarios.

>TODO: Consider using more secure lookup mechanisms for encryption keys. Also check for existing encryption keys before auto-generating a new encryption key set.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#125

Hey everyone. I don't want to start a debate or anything, I'm just looking for a privacy concerned chat service that I can easily teach my fiance to sign up for and use. She gave up on Pidgin, and I would appreciate any pros/cons for your favorite service of this kind. Thank you in advance!

I personally love Threema [1], which is available for iOS, Android, Microsoft and Web. It uses a random ID to identify users, uses End-to-end encryption, you can make voice calls, send messages, audio messages, GIF’s etc.. Oh, and it has a dark theme!

Please note that Threema is not open source. If you want that go for Signal instead.

[1] - https://threema.ch/en

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#126
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) Recognized by whom? The XSF has standardized their core in IETF. Is there something similar for Matrix.org Foundation? > trying to solve existing problems using new approaches is how things evolve. What new approaches? You're just recreating federated IM network using different wire format. How on earth is it innova…

> Recognized by whom? The foundations responsible for the protocols look to be pretty similar to me (both non-profit orgs), and would be equally recognized as such by the general public. Obviously XSF contributed XMPP to the IETF after 10 years or so, and perhaps we'll end up contributing Matrix to IETF or W3C or whoever too if they'll have it. > How on earth is it innovative or new? > Since you invented nothing new,…

> Obviously XSF contributed XMPP to the IETF after 10 years or so

The first RFC was approved in 2004, after 5 years of XMPP development. The last RFC from XMPP WG is from 2015.

> perhaps we'll end up contributing Matrix to IETF or W3C or whoever too if they'll have it

So it's planned (TM).

> I wonder if the XMPP community would spend less time constantly complaining about Matrix if they understood what it was :/

I wonder if Matrix community would stop spreading misinformation about the purpose of their protocol.

> The innovative bit of Matrix is that it's a replicated database of objects (events), similar to Git, but designed for syncing conversation history around in realtime. The events for a given room get replicated over all the participating nodes. There is no central server responsible for coordinating the room; instead all the participating ones do so equally. It's impossible to communicate with someone on a different node without effectively giving them a lazy-loaded HA replica of the room. Architecturally this is about as opposite of MUC (or MIX or FMUC or DMUC or whatever) as I can think of.

Given how bad your Synapse at this task you guys have failed miserably. But of course Dendrite is planned (TM) to resolve this.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#127
Looking at the documentation this looks to be at a very early stage, but after reading it I think it's mostly on the right track to become a very interesting platform... It's decentralised by design, has support for most things people expect (read notifications, group chats, polls, images, video, location, contact), almost every feature is usable by someone with a regular e-mail client and integrations should be very easy to develop (any e-mail library is good for developing a COI bot). Looking forward to a client and server to play around with... maybe I'll make my own as a toy!

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#128
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wait, they will not. I can not find any reference to a working client implementation on their website. Are they expecting others to write implementations?

That's one client we are working on. That client uses delta.chat core to which we are also contributing.

That's great, I'm really excited about your project.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#129
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's like complaining your IM gets access to your e-mail conversations. Or browser gets full access to your phone calls history. Access to your e-mail account allows you to reset password in most services associated with it.

No, it's a client that uses your email account for purposes involving reading and sending email. Exactly like Thunderbird, or Evolution Mail, or Outlook, or Android Mail, or iOS Mail or countless other clients that have full access to your email client by design, and without issue. People generally take issue with handing over access to their email account to third party services. People don't generally take issue wi…

OK, fair enough, depends who provides the app. So far the project author(s) seem anonymous.

(And no, the fact of being open source is not enough, at least not until certain popularity is reached)

I've tried many XMPP clients on mobile but I would be afraid to test many e-mail clients.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#130
post #61

A German newspaper has some more information on that, for example that this is headed by Rafael Laguna of Open-Xchange https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/whatsapp-konkurrent-open... The aim seems to be to create a system that can replace centralized messenger solutions by allowing use of existing IMAP servers or hosting one yourself. I am not sure if this is correct but the article states that they are already suppl…

Note:

> three quarters of all IMAP servers

doesn't not mean 3/4 of internet users (e.g. I expect Google's IMAP servers represent a disproportionately large number of users).

Dovecot is likely more likely to be used by a long tail of smaller nodes.

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