Wanted? Email-chat compliant Dekko. Messaging with UBports and beyond?
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@gnu-mobile Firstly, thanks for trying to gather some interest around your idea.
If this was to be implemented in Dekko it wouldn't use the deltachat-core library, as that would be a really intrusive change that will take alot of effort for a library that only supports a subset of what Dekko currently provides. I would rather implement the delta chat specification in Dekko's current libraries as it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to add. Autocrypt seems very promising and i'm considering adding that as the first pgp implementation for Dekko, I really like this idea of "opportunistic encryption" that gets out the way of the user. Really nice!
I think the big issue would be how to separate a chat view from the standard mailbox views. Dekko supports adding filter plugins which process messages before adding them to the mailstore. So we could possibly filter for chat messages and apply flags so they appear in a virtual "Chats" folder. The chat messages would be left in the Inbox folder so they can still be accessed from a standard MUA, and filtered out of Dekko's Inbox views to try and make a clear separation of standard email vs chat threads.
I'd be interested to see some mockups of how you (or anyone else) think this should look in Dekko.
Regards
Dan
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Hey, thanks for responding! Only a quick reply:
Also thought the chat/email separation might not be so trivial (therefore suggested the lib) but an advantage of Dekko would be that as it is a full email client, a falsely categorized message could be easily moved.
The spec uses a regular IMAP folder "Chats" but they need an idea for a better name: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core/issues/47
later
Edit: another one concerning possible filtering criteria https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/49#issuecomment-335565565
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I made a mockup from the screenshots, now. Thought of a new button or virtual folder that lists the current chats in the left pane (the screenshot happens to be from delta chat's long-press-on-chat feature (for archiving or deleting). The right pane shows the opened chat with the messages and text input line.
If both re-implementing all the things in Dekko as well as switching backends is too much work, maybe it is easiest to just embed deltachat within Dekko.
PS: There is also an article about why one should consider email chat: https://delta.chat/en/2017-05-31-delta-makes-chatting-better
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Looks great, it would be cool to have that implemented to dekko.
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@gnu-mobile said in Wanted? Email-chat compliant Dekko. Messaging with UBports and beyond?:
I made a mockup from the screenshots, now. Thought of a new button or virtual folder that lists the current chats in the left pane (the screenshot happens to be from delta chat's long-press-on-chat feature (for archiving or deleting). The right pane shows the opened chat with the messages and text input line.
If both re-implementing all the things in Dekko as well as switching backends is too much work, maybe it is easiest to just embed deltachat within Dekko.
I'm not sure what you mean by "embed deltachat"? It's not really possible to just embed an android app like it's an iframe or something.
This layout isn't possible with dekko's plugin architecture. Where you have placed the delta chat icon in the left side action bar is used to determine which plugin is displayed. So there is a mail plugin which loads the mail views in the reamining window area to the right. It will be the same for calendar, contacts etc when they are complete.
The two options i can see from this are
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Keep the delta chat icon in it;s current location and create a new view (well it will actually be a plugin) that will contain the chats list and chat view but won't have the folder list on the left side. as it's really not needed in this context.
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Create a "Chats" virtual folder in the left navigation panel. Possibly below "All inboxes" which when selected would open the chats list and chat view like in your mockup. This approach though would mean adding additional complexity to the views that might cause some bother.
Personally i'm more in favour of option 1 as it could then be included/installed as an optional plugin. In the future there will be an extensions store but until then it could be shipped with dekko and just need to be enabled by the user.
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@gnu-mobile yes, let's integrate as mouch as possible into Dekko. why have several apps -one should be able to do the work... eh?
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@tomrausner said in Wanted? Email-chat compliant Dekko. Messaging with UBports and beyond?:
@gnu-mobile yes, let's integrate as mouch as possible into Dekko. why have several apps -one should be able to do the work... eh?
This! TouchEmacs for the world!
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@doniks said in Wanted? Email-chat compliant Dekko. Messaging with UBports and beyond?:
This! TouchEmacs for the world!
you got it!
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If you have a look at the issue reports, implementing the email chat backend in a way that supports email and chat with a single account as well as separate accounts and multi clients is not a trivial task at all. Also, considering that delta chat is usable but still in beta state, maybe it is better not to re-implement until the best design becomes visible.
That's why I thought about "embedding", which might not be the correct term. If qt doesn't provide any way to show external widgets, maybe some bindings could be added to the delta chat client allowing it to be shown/used from within Dekko?
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I have thought about the two options (icon vs. virtual folder).
The folder list could be quite usefull to move messages around, and favor the virtual folder solution. For example, when a spam message gets into a chat (false negative), it would be nice to be able to just drag it away into the spam folder. Or another idea, to be able to drag a received email message into the virtual chat folder to open a chat with the sender or sender+recipient group.
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Deltachat-core got at least python and node language bindings by now, and even a first command line interface is there.
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core/issues/130 -
Intro to the simple API for a chat interface: https://deltachat.github.io/api/
