On 02/12/2019 08:29 AM, Der Mor wrote:
Am Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:25:06 +0100
schrieb Marco Vittorini Orgeas <marco@mavior.eu>:


There is no "sole purpose" to the account sharing than trying to
balance and adapt with what we perceive as user expectations.
We've had many discussions with people on and off line -- if there
would be one easy obvious solution we'd maybe go for it ;)  

And I, for one, would like to hear and discuss with these
people...where are they?

I am one of the people who advocated for shared account in the offline
discussions.
I use DeltaChat Dev with a dedicated account and DeltaChat FDroid with
a shared account. Works fine for me, so far. Neither account is my
"major" Mailing account with 1000+ Mails / Day and I don't think that
Delta is (or could be) a good MUA for accounts like this.
I agree, as I said many times before, Delta should not try to be a sort of "fancy-UI MUA" (and this is what I expected and understood by reading the site contents back in 2017).
Thus what I don't understand is why then Delta tries so hard to be one!
For instance, it allows to reply to regular emails with a "dumb" editing environment: how
someone would want to quote/reply to emails while digitizing over a touch screen of no more than some cm is really behind me! It is already pretty difficult/impossible to email with dedicated mobile MUAs!
In a shared scenario this behavior is also quite degrading for the "chat experience" because not-savvy/newbies don't understand why they receive emails inside the delta chat, once they have replied/messaged to one of their known contacts.
And delta will leave all chat/email messages in the INBOX, so once accessed with a regular MUA the email experience is also degraded because there would be tons of small (chat) emails which aren't filtered by Delta now cluttering up the INBOX!

But I am also a Dev and so I think any change to the status quo should
be made as a proposal on how it should behave, precisely. I have not
seen that yet in this thread so I abstained from commenting (and am
only doing so because you asked where "these people" are).

There weren't proposals in the thread because we have yet to understand precisely what is the behavior of Delta in the shared scenario, which anyway as it stands now is still quite complex.
Quoting again Holger back in October (I'm re-quoting the original "move to dedicated account" proposal at the bottom of the email for reference as the web archive has lost it, I guess many don't know what we are talking here):

There has been a lot of negative feedback related to "shared accounts" ...
just the freshest one from today's IRC from a new user dropping in: 

    if I send a chat to Joe, he answers, he is on my contact list.
    Then he sends me a normal email, it will show up in Delta chat, which I 
    don't expect to, unless it is a reply to the chat.


If you want a specific behaviour then please specify it as precisely as
possible as a feature proposal that has the option of being turned off
for other people who don't like it. Please be aware that Dev Time is
a scarce resource so it might be that no Dev picks it up and does your

The behavior lacking is very simple (and I'm quite surprised I still can't make the idea through), it's a simple branch:

if (headers.Contain('Chat-*:')) {
    move-to-folder('Chat')
}

This way delta would act as a chat client on top of the existing email accounts, and I could start again recommending it without fear that the other user INBOX be messed up by delta assumptions.

It could be called a "strict mode" given the present "loose" situation, but I won't because I'd like to think about it as a "chat" mode ;) .

If somebody really want to "email in real time with me" without using delta, then, again, aliases/subject prefixes could be used to "trigger" delta for the whole conversation.

Original Holger's "move to dedicated account" proposal following for the record (mostly unaccounted for how the single issues have been dealt with or discussed in offline chatting):

hey, 

last week Bjoern visited for a couple of days and among
other stuff we discussed "shared" versus "dedicated" accounts.  
Shared accounts are ones which are used by both traditional
e-mail apps (Thunderbird, Webmail, Outlook etc.) and DeltaChat.  
Whereas dedicated accounts are ones only used by DeltaChat. 

There has been a lot of negative feedback related to "shared accounts" ...
just the freshest one from today's IRC from a new user dropping in: 

    if I send a chat to Joe, he answers, he is on my contact list.
    Then he sends me a normal email, it will show up in Delta chat, which I 
    don't expect to, unless it is a reply to the chat.

This is "expected" from the implementation side: if you accept
a contact (opening a chat with a contact implicitely accepts the contact)
then all messages, including new "threads", from/to that contact 
are "owned" by deltachat. 

Then, the logic / implementation which moves messages from
the INBOX to the DeltaChat folder has issues, which lead
to messages remaining in INBOX which should be in DeltaChat. 
the current 0.20 Android version is known to have issues with it
but they haven't been found yet. 

So we have both user expectation mismatch and implementation
complexity issues here. The Move-to-DeltaChat actions also 
cause extra network requests, on a side note. 

Therefore we think it's better to move towards recommending 
**dedicated e-mail accounts for DeltaChat**.  You may still
use it "shared" but there will be no features or much development
effort sunk into it. 

One problem with dedicated accounts is that people can't
easily use their address-book to get into contact with each other.
There is a potentially nice mitigation for this.  Let's presume
that when you setup DeltaChat with your dedicated account 
you may specify your traditional e-mail address so that
DeltaChat knows about this address. Then ...

- if you receive a mail on the traditional e-mail address
  (with any MUA/webmail) you can forward it to your DeltaChat
  account which will automatically open a chat with the 
  original poster. You will see the original poster's message
  and can type a chat-reply.  The original poster will see messages
  coming from the dedicated chat address. 
  If the poster now also fowards the chat-mail to her 
  delta-address (if it wasn't already a delta-address!), 
  the two delta's would be talking with each other through 
  the dedicated addresses only.

- People with dedicated accounts wouldn't get "surprising"
  e-mail as contact requests.  Also there is less chance of 
  dropping back to unencrypted communications because we saw
  some non-autocrypt mails from a webmailer/thunderbird etc. 

- DeltaChat could mark contacts/email-addresses if it 
  saw >99% DeltaChat messages with it (maybe a small "delta" or so),
  allowing to make a choice if you want to contact someone
  via the delta or their "normal" e-mail address. 

- DeltaChat can make it easy to share things with the "tied" 
  normal email address to send attachments/pictures etc. 

DeltaChat would then stop to do the move INBOX -> DeltaChat
folder thingie. You could still access your DeltaChat account
with thunderbird/gmail-web interface etc. but you'd see 
the DeltaChat messages in your inbox.  Gmail for example
would condense 30 replies into a single line so maybe
that's not so bad. 

Note that the question of dedicated versus shared accounts
does NOT have any effect on DC's ability to contact other e-mail
addresses with arbitrary non-Delta MUAs -- that's fully continuing
to work and be supported.

so much for now ... feedback welcome.

holger
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-- 
Marco