RE: mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/116…

The world-wide #chatmail relay network is growing in various wonderful ways. #freebsd joined the world-wide federated secure communication party and BSD cafe offers a public relay at chatmail.bsd.cafe :) Thanks @stefano @feld and @outofcreativity !

Stefano Marinelli

2026-06-06 08:10:20

Dear friends of the BSD Cafe,
One of the principles this place was built on has always been free communication. Whether on the Fediverse or on Matrix, the goal is the same: open, secure, private, decentralized tools. Because we know, from experience, that anything centralized will sooner or later come to an end.
Matrix is great, and we like it. But it's tied to its server - you can't migrate away (easily). It does its job well, yet sometimes it asks for more than a conversation should: heavy to host, hard to leave.
So when my friend @outofcreativity brought it up again at EuroBSDCon, I decided to give Delta Chat another try after many years. And yes - its philosophy fits mine, and the Cafe’s, well.

For a few months we ran a relay - a chatmail server - but it was on Debian, and I didn't want to make an official service that runs on Debian. Not because it doesn't work: it works perfectly. But because it wouldn't be in the spirit of this place.

Thanks to @feld 's excellent cookbook recipe, I also kept a private relay of my own running for months, just to test it. It held up beautifully. So yesterday, with the help of some friends in the cookbook chat, I migrated the Debian server to FreeBSD - accounts and data included - and I can finally call it a stable, official Cafe service.

Our chatmail relay - chatmail.bsd.cafe - runs on FreeBSD, in a jail. Which means it gets everything the other services get: hourly backups via zfs send and receive, FreeBSD's security, and all the rest.

I'd encourage everyone to try Delta Chat. Secure, decentralized communication built on protocols we already know and trust: the ones behind email. And the development is moving fast. Multi-relay is no longer a promise - it's here, and it's solid: a single profile can use several relays at once, so your account and your reachability survive even if one of them goes down and disappears. That's real resilience. The real decentralization, the one we love.

Because Signal is great. But Signal, too, is centralized. And we happen to like the true spirit of the Internet.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements #DeltaChat #ChatMail #Communication #OwnYourData

chatmail.bsd.cafe home

^{chatmail.bsd.cafe}

I think that accusation is false. Everything is open source, and #deltachat is still compatible with email. However, the user experience in this area has definitely worsened.

Since DC works best with #chatmail relays, and these only allow encrypted emails, but very few users encrypt them, email compatibility no longer makes much sense for me. From my perspective, it would be better to abandon email compatibility altogether. The current rather ambivalent approach only leads to confusion and discussions. Furthermore, it would offer the opportunity to get rid of some disadvantages such as base64.

On the other hand, I wonder if one could use an email address as a kind of optional anchor identity?
It's an advantage that you can't find contacts in DC, but this can also be seen as a major disadvantage.
DC could optionally read the address book and send a special email to all contacts with an invite code and a special header that DC recognizes. This way, you could find contacts who are already using DC. Further communication would then take place via chatmail relays. Email would only serve as a kind of user discovery layer. The relays themselves would no longer need to be compatible with email.
But this would weaken security, and there would likely be problems with many email providers who might consider these emails spam if the contact list is very large.

Dear friends of the BSD Cafe,
One of the principles this place was built on has always been free communication. Whether on the Fediverse or on Matrix, the goal is the same: open, secure, private, decentralized tools. Because we know, from experience, that anything centralized will sooner or later come to an end.
Matrix is great, and we like it. But it's tied to its server - you can't migrate away (easily). It does its job well, yet sometimes it asks for more than a conversation should: heavy to host, hard to leave.
So when my friend @outofcreativity brought it up again at EuroBSDCon, I decided to give Delta Chat another try after many years. And yes - its philosophy fits mine, and the Cafe’s, well.

For a few months we ran a relay - a chatmail server - but it was on Debian, and I didn't want to make an official service that runs on Debian. Not because it doesn't work: it works perfectly. But because it wouldn't be in the spirit of this place.

Thanks to @feld 's excellent cookbook recipe, I also kept a private relay of my own running for months, just to test it. It held up beautifully. So yesterday, with the help of some friends in the cookbook chat, I migrated the Debian server to FreeBSD - accounts and data included - and I can finally call it a stable, official Cafe service.

Our chatmail relay - chatmail.bsd.cafe - runs on FreeBSD, in a jail. Which means it gets everything the other services get: hourly backups via zfs send and receive, FreeBSD's security, and all the rest.

I'd encourage everyone to try Delta Chat. Secure, decentralized communication built on protocols we already know and trust: the ones behind email. And the development is moving fast. Multi-relay is no longer a promise - it's here, and it's solid: a single profile can use several relays at once, so your account and your reachability survive even if one of them goes down and disappears. That's real resilience. The real decentralization, the one we love.

Because Signal is great. But Signal, too, is centralized. And we happen to like the true spirit of the Internet.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements #DeltaChat #ChatMail #Communication #OwnYourData