Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

delta.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#81

Post by em-bee »

miroljub wrote: post #56
n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it a couple years ago and it sorted everything neatly into a Deltachat folder. But a friend of mine also complained abut too many mails

The issue is, if an email is sent to one of my aliases, instead of seeing one conversation between the sender and a recipient (my alias) every message creates a new group chat with the sender, my main account and my alias as members. For every single mail, even when all members are the same, a new group is created. When I reply in that group, then the email will be sent to all group members, including the original se…

a long time ago i envisioned that mail clients should really display mails as a conversation just like you describe. a list with all my contacts. and opening the contact gives me all emails received and sent with that contact.

if you want to use different aliases in deltachat, i think the best option for now is to create different deltachat profiles for each. you can have multiple profiles active at once and you get notifications for all of them, you only have to switch profiles to see all the messages. switching profiles is a single click and feels like switching folders in traditional mail clients.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#82

Post by em-bee »

drpossum wrote: post #22
sras-me wrote: post #16

In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".

To say nothing of the fact that most people are not running their own email servers so that messaging is going to reside in places they don't own and the fact that relays get to read about everything exacerbating that problem, so you cannot really expect forward secrecy: Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email, which is not widely used for a reason? Here's a discussion https://www.latacora.com/blo…

messaging is going to reside in places they don't own

but that is the case with every messenger that stores messages on your behalf. telegram, whatsapp, signal... with those ALL people are not running their own servers.

whatsapp and signal store encrypted copies of the messages, and so does deltachat.

beyond that each client also stores a copy of each message locally. as does deltachat.

in difference to all others at least with deltachat i have a choice to use a different server that i trust. with whatsapp and signal i don't have that choice.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#83

Post by chuckadams »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #41
bo1024 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify "cracked"?

PGP has been cracked when you use it with automation in that you can steal keys slowly by relying on the meta-behavior of systems around PGP. A classic attack here is timing how long it takes for a PGP-based automated system to reject your messages. PGP is intended for the classic "used by a human to encrypt emails manually" flow and is actually insecure if you automate around it.

I'm fairly sure they meant "cracked" as slang for "solved", as in "I've cracked the case."

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#84

Post by em-bee »

drpossum wrote: post #22
sras-me wrote: post #16

In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".

To say nothing of the fact that most people are not running their own email servers so that messaging is going to reside in places they don't own and the fact that relays get to read about everything exacerbating that problem, so you cannot really expect forward secrecy: Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email, which is not widely used for a reason? Here's a discussion https://www.latacora.com/blo…

Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email

it doesn't solve all of them but a few at least. i don't believe using pgp itself is a problem. if it was deltachat could replace it with another better encryption.

metadata is a problem. that could be solved by removing messages from the email server and storing them elsewhere. (or storing them back on the server with the metadata removed). that doesn't prevent intermediate mail forwarders from keeping a copy though. i think that is the real problem. deltachat doesn't control the communication channel and can't prevent leaking. i don't know how matrix or jabber compare here. if they use intermediate servers to forward messages the problem would remain.

message content leaking is not a problem because messages won't ever be decrypted on the server.

long term secret leaking is a problem tied to the current implementation of pgp. deltachat could change that (and maybe it does?)

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#85

Post by rahen »

rahen wrote: post #6

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes. However this comes with serious trade-offs. PGP lacks forward secrecy: if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted. Also IMAP offers no metadata privacy, anyone can see who you email and how often. Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy with their double ratch…

edit: I was wrong, Delta Chat now has forward secrecy from v1.48: https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime

Furthermore metadata transparency can be made less problematic by using email aliases.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#86

Post by immibis »

miroljub wrote: post #12
miki123211 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven E2E only requires a correctly-designed client, not a correctly-designed server. Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers. Not to mention that OpenWhi…

One trust is lost, it's hard to regain it. The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them. If you live in an authoritarian state with a track record of spying on individual citizens, and without legal protection for the privacy of foreign citizens, it's legitimate to decide not to trust a company like Meta headquartered in the USA.

> The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them.

That is not strictly true. It is possible to reverse-engineer the client. It's unlikely that anyone will find the motivation to do so, but there's no law of physics that says they can't. You can theoretically review the code that is running on your device - it's just harder than with an open source reproducible build.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#88

Post by INTPenis »

lxgr wrote: post #47
INTPenis wrote: post #44

I wish I could send a one-time link to my father where we could play chess against each other by re-visiting the same link. The e-mail part made me think of this. I have no use for an e-mail based chat but an online chess game that's easy to use without registration would be cool. He's 82 and he can't use complex sites.

> an online chess game that's easy to use without registration would be cool Lichess lets you play without registration, I believe (or at least one player; not sure if both sides can be anonymous).

Lichess was indeed perfect. I was hoping for a self-hosted solution like hedgedoc but lichess does what it needs to.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#90

Post by miroljub »

em-bee wrote: post #81
miroljub wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is, if an email is sent to one of my aliases, instead of seeing one conversation between the sender and a recipient (my alias) every message creates a new group chat with the sender, my main account and my alias as members. For every single mail, even when all members are the same, a new group is created. When I reply in that group, then the email will be sent to all group members, including the original se…

a long time ago i envisioned that mail clients should really display mails as a conversation just like you describe. a list with all my contacts. and opening the contact gives me all emails received and sent with that contact. if you want to use different aliases in deltachat, i think the best option for now is to create different deltachat profiles for each. you can have multiple profiles active at once and you get…

Yes, but the issue is they all share the same inbox, and my email server doesn't support server-side incoming filters so I can distribute mails to separate inbox folders that would be monitored by DeltaChat.

Alias is a standard email feature. If Delta Chat want's to be usable as a general mail client, aliases should just work.

Post reply on HN