#iran mostly shut down now their own state-aligned national messengers that they previously positioned as alternatives to Western messengers and Telegram, especially for when the internet is nationalized and locked down.

There remain some islands of functioning delta messaging but the lockdown of private comms is truly dire, and likely a precursor for heightened violence.This correlation is not a political stance but reflects research in internet shutdowns of the last decade. Ask eg @Xeniax

PSA We are happy about the wealth of privacy focused classic email providers (proton, tutanota, posteo, mailbox.org etc) but they are not geared for instant secure messaging. Do yourself, family and friends a favor and use delta with any of the many https://chatmail.at/relays

Or setup a relay of your own if you feel like it.

Or use a a dedicated chat email address on your own or any classic email server that has reliable service and no obnoxious rate limits or annoying spam handling.

Cheers.

@jrp mostly, it works, yes, despite various state attempts to block it. and we are working on making it harder, based on some R&D heavy revisions of how delta chat actually works internally. Last big change was https://delta.chat/en/2025-08-04-encryption-v2 which is in fact enabling another level of resilience and decentralization but that will be published about in a future blog post likely in spring 2026.

Our stance simplified: we want to make private communications available to anyone on the planet.

Problem: governments everywhere tend to want to control and contain private communications. While Iran and Russia might be contemporary poster examples trying to control private communication, almost all of the "Western" countries have similar control-tendencies, EU Chatcontrol, UK Online Safety Act, US KOSA etc.pp. And we often call those out. Without private communication, things are bleak.

@soatok please read more carefully the source code. You are in the "else" branch of "if strict_tls" and strict_tls is True by default.

It's pretty deep down in advanced menus to opt out of the default strict tls handling (with RustTLS btw). Opt out is needed for some users who would otherwise have no TLS at all in their national environment, and where they often use public WIFIs, so eavesdropping cleartext from people around is trivial but cracking RSA1024 is not.