alt Hacker NewsI was really excited about an app called Delta Chat that created a chat-like experience over email. And so I installed it and got my family to use it and hooked it up to my mail server that I have with my web host. And it was kind of disappointing. It never worked as well as I wanted. Notifications didn't come in as expected. And it was kind of difficult to use.
Fast forward several years, and my son mentioned a chat app called Arcane Chat. And so I looked into it and was astonished to find that it's basically very similar to Delta Chat, and completely compatible with it. Instead of using regular email servers, it makes use of chatmail servers instead. which are a restricted form of the email protocol that enforce security and make a few other changes that make hosting it much easier.
I've been using it for the past several months with my family and it's completely replaced both XMPP and Signal for us. I'm currently using somebody else's chatmail server for our accounts, but I'm seriously considering getting a $5 VPS and hosting one myself.
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deltachat also recommends its own servers now, so effectively arcanechat is just another deltachat client, or rather both are chatmail clients, and possibly both use the same relay implementation
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> chatmail
So I went to [0] and [1] and still cannot understand what it is. This is a problem with a lot of opensource: landing pages fail to explain the "what". I get we're all techies and love to dive straight into the "how", but it really doesn't help when you're not in the "chatmail" club.
[0] https://chatmail.at/
[1] https://github.com/chatmail