I guess that's why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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I love that this exists but never have used it.
Several people have tried to do this.
Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?
I usually dismiss them as quickly as I discover them because I know how the underlying technology behind email works and I don't agree that it should be presented in the form of chats.
So each time I see it, it only resides in my mind for a few minutes at most.
I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)
cool of you to keep in contact with them :) i have always wanted to do this but i know it would isolate me and inconvenience others just to communicate with me
I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are... It's not, it never will be... It's gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.
check out deltachat! it's still email, yea, but it feels instantaneous
No thanks. I want email to be email. If I want to chat, I'll use another application and protocol.
The old internet was a crucible for robust software. Slow, small, unreliable, the very protocols that send data over the wire and through the air had to build in all kinds of fail-safe features to even approach usefulness. From this we got things like email (POP & SMTP), internet relay chat (IRC), and the world-wide web (HTTP). Things used to be so bad, that these technologies endure as extremely over-built in the modern era. And if things get worse, it will keep working as it always has. They'll probably stick with us because of that.
asynchronous
Any form of text based communication is asynchronous
as in the server chats with another
Centralized servers in which 2 users talk can be considered "synchronous" because they get the message nearly instantly, but yea, we often use NoSQL async calls for instant messaging apps
Oh on a technical level yes. But on the surface it's still asynchronous, as long as you can't tell whether the other person has read your message (which, to be fair, a lot of messaging applications have as a feature)
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.
I need an alternative to gmail for creating new email accounts. Any ideas?
Get a cheap hosting plan. You'll get a domain, several mailboxes and you can mess around with services like Nextcloud
Unfortunately, that doesn't work anymore. Even assuming you have the technical skill to avoid making your server into a spam relay the moment it's turned on. Which itself isn't easy, even for seasoned IT people.
The major providers are Google, Outlook, and Yahoo. Even if you don't use one of those, you're going to be sending to people who do. To combat spam, they check your domain and see if it has a track record of not being a spammer. A brand new domain on a brand new host has no way of establishing that track record, and the email will bounce.
You can get a track record by hosting your domain under an existing service. There's no way to bootstrap it on your own anymore.
Just get a domain from a normal provider. It will work.
No, it will not. If it works at first, it won't for long.
My online community SDF was founded in 1987, four years before Tim Berners Lee invented the web. They are so old that their FAQ still refers to email as "Arpanet email". Guess what? Emails from SDF don't reach Big Tech servers. I'm positive that the beards of their admins are grayer than mine and they will have tried to tweak every nook and cranny available.
What are we left with?
You cannot set up a home email server.
You cannot set it up on a VPS.
You cannot set it up on your own datacenter.
You can totally go to Hetzner, GoDaddy or other hosting providers, get a domain and send mails to Gmail.
No, you can't. Read the blog for why you can't.
you seem to have me confused with the IT linux wizard type lemmy. I didn't even understand half of that sentence
OutLook? I'm still rocking my Hotmail address LOL
deltachat is awesome
That is why everyone should be using Delta Chat
I'm using cpanel email and it's terrible. Can someone recommend something cheap but better than cpanel?
What's wrong with cpanel?
Some places block email coming from my cpanel email.
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