this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Chatmail makes e-mail cheap again

new chatmail-based instant onboarding system, e-mail addresses are becoming, like in the early 2000s, cheap and virtually free. But this time around, there is no company posturing to “do no evil” luring everyone to their central “ethical” service and then drop the pretense soon after. Running a chatmail server is a cheap activity that we want people to be able to do on the side and on low-end hardware all across the world. Chatmail is best described as an ephemeral end-to-end encrypted messaging routing system running at Internet-scale.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

someone needs to rewrite this, both the post here and the promo copy on the website, it's hella confusing and explains nada.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

OK, so what this purports to do is use your email server as chat platform. kinda intriguing, could have several use cases, don't know what it does with existing email or how the chat looks like in e.g. thunderbird...

unfortunately, after installing it and being unsuccessful about having it login to my IMAP account (works fine with thunderbird), I've given up.

so, the "onboarding" is less than stellar and the desktop app is electron, which I hate; haven't tried the android app.

edit: it works, the initial login process just takes super long; guess it's trying different ports and stuff to be auto-magical. works fine for intra-server comms (accounts belonging to same domain), adding secondary device works (android, from f-droid). comms (encrypted) are stored in a separate IMAP folder that's unreadable to "normal" mail clients, so it doesn't disturb e.g. thunderbird. a fine array of customizations in the apps, will be testing it further.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

For someone relatively tech illiterate like myself- how does this compare to something like telegram and signal? What's the benefit?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

the benefit is that it uses the existing email systems, and doesnt require account or data storage with other services

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

the benefit is that it uses the existing email systems

Instant Message Delivery

These two things conflict then. SMTP as a protocol is NOT instant. Far from actually. It's best effort.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Libre software and more decentralised than Signal but less than SimpleX.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What is up with SimpleX people? It's like the new Rust or NixOS crowd. Anytime a messenger is mentioned, you can bet there's a comment about SimpleX in there.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

SimpleX is libre software and decentralised, the most decentralised voice chat here, so why spread anything else?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Can someone ELI5? I still don't get it after reading the post description and the link.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's a instant messenger that uses email as the backbone.

Kind of like how SMS and MMS was bootstrapped to a telephone number.

Eg: [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Very nice, a big issue for nooby users was the mess Deltachat created in their regular email inbox.