Email based Messaging (Delta Chat and COI)

There are tons of messengers out their, but they all share the same problem. They are all isolated from each other, so if you want to contact someone via this messenger, the other person has to use this same messenger too. This leads to everyone using the same shitty messenger (in my region this is WhatsApp), although there are many better alternatives.

A solution to this problem can be the use of email for messaging. There’s already Delta Chat for quite some time and now also COI (Chat over IMAP) which tries to solve the problem in a similar way with it’s own protocol.

What I really like about this is, that using the existing email infrastructure enables everyone to communicate with each other without the restriction to use the same messenger or client. Anyone can choose any client and can still be connected. Just login with your usual email account. You don’t even need to use one of those messaging optimized clients and stay with your regular email client.

It would also enable the decentralization of messaging. Email (as long as not everyone uses Gmail) is decentralized, but messaging via WhatsApp and similar services isn’t. Decentralizing messaging again would be a good step to bring power back to the people. If your email provider does bad things, just switch to another one, but stay in touch with your contacts.

If you want to try out Delta Chat, feel free to leave me a message and we can delta chat… 😄

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