Right after the #Signal outage yesterday, I took a closer look at #deltachat.
While I knew that it uses e-mail protocols like SMTP and IMAP under the hood, I always thought you have to enter the credentials of your e-mail account simply because DeltaChat is using that account to transfer messages.
But to my surprise, you can just create a profile on a chatmail relay, even without providing a password at all. While I have no idea how this works, I assume that it generates a key pair on your local device. But how is this connected to my profile name? Is a profile name unique? When I uninstall the app is my profile lost?
Delta Chat (npub17gp…nrxn)
Julian
npub1yq…p69ha
2026-02-04 16:00:57 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1yqet3hr6fkxtscvgnrlz2sc0d9vmpa0x8gsc058x06zc76hrdtfsjp69haSeen on
wss://relay.momostr.pinkPublished at
2026-02-04 16:00:57 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "e677d098d7352bb97ea34a6afc29b0c4e5fcf0c2b6e4c59cb2a68089ae70172c",
"pubkey": "2032b8dc7a4d8cb8618898fe25430f6959b0f5e63a2187d0e67e858f6ae36ad3",
"created_at": 1770220857,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"p",
"f202d7a843c41d717dddf6cb013d6ef689f44f12214c6ed421b484020aec2208"
],
[
"t",
"deltachat"
],
[
"t",
"signal"
],
[
"proxy",
"https://social.tchncs.de/@mialikescoffee/116013194112164315",
"web"
],
[
"proxy",
"https://social.tchncs.de/users/mialikescoffee/statuses/116013194112164315",
"activitypub"
],
[
"L",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"l",
"pink.momostr.activitypub:https://social.tchncs.de/users/mialikescoffee/statuses/116013194112164315",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"-"
]
],
"content": "Right after the #Signal outage yesterday, I took a closer look at #deltachat. \nWhile I knew that it uses e-mail protocols like SMTP and IMAP under the hood, I always thought you have to enter the credentials of your e-mail account simply because DeltaChat is using that account to transfer messages.\n\nBut to my surprise, you can just create a profile on a chatmail relay, even without providing a password at all. While I have no idea how this works, I assume that it generates a key pair on your local device. But how is this connected to my profile name? Is a profile name unique? When I uninstall the app is my profile lost?\n\nnostr:npub17gpd02zrcswhzlwa7m9sz0tw76ylgncjy9xxa4ppkjzqyzhvygyqvynrxn",
"sig": "89bbfdbb9f4bb952a07abf349f2b54ca15e30058cf3df20831ebbd93d3335116c49f7b103b023cbc64d4e73fbe1a4bed6a7ec863a8055a9276e66cb474913f02"
}