What is the difference between this and Signal?
Deltachat basically turns emails into instant messaging, so nobody needs to set up servers or instances, self hosters just need a working SMTP
Since the email traffic increases a lot (every message you send counts as an email), some providers might block your account after a very short while, on suspicion of some sort of bad behavior.
So… Its worse?
In some ways (initial configuration, relying on mail provider), yes.
I’ve been eyeing Deltachat for a while, mostly for work related stuff: since everyone has a work email, ditching it for whatsapp for all work related chatter made perfect sense.
Unfortunately for me, higher-up orders blocks anyone from using outlook/thunderbird and similars, so Delta doesn’t work either.
When I did try to connect with my personal outlook.com email, it didn’t work for 3 days, until it finally did because fuck if I know. Gmail seemed to work fine.
Why?
I assume it’s Meta’s ownership of WhatsApp now that Zuck donned the red tie.
Why not just use Signal?
Or simplex chat or anything else
Threema, Signal, and Matrix are great alternatives, too.