Secure Chat through the Email Backbone - Finally!

I saw this come up in Mastodon the other day and had to check it out! It’s actually kind of awesome looking. Basically the Delta Chat project did something that makes people smack their own head and go “Duhhhhhhh!”.

They wanted a few things in a chat application

  • a chat application that can be secure.
  • a chap application that can be run on multiple devces
  • a chat application that doesn’t require you to somehow convince all of your friends an family to jump ship from the closed source super-crud that’s out there today (because, let’s face it, that will never happen).

Then they thought…Email.

Delta Chat is a chat application that has no centralized server(s) that you have to trust your data to. it has noreal login method controlled by some massive, evil, cruddy corporation. It’s just a secure chat application that can run on the current email infrstructure that’s already out in the world.

You get the app (Linux, Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, and I imagine BSD too). Install it, then set it up to run on whatever your email is.

Now start a chat conversation by sending an email through the app. It looks like Chat, but doesn’t require the recipient to use Delta Chat. They’ll just get an email.

Here’s a little snippet where I had a conversation from my FixITDelRio mail to my gmail. You can see the delta chat view, then my gmail view below it.

If you’re interested in Delta Chat, here’s a link