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