Thanks for your interest and support over the years!
If you appreciate Delta Chat as a nice (clear-text) e-mail client, like also @Raiden and others expressly do, then it’s understandable that recent directions of the project, including V2 releases, raise concerns and objections. Up until May 12th 2024 the Delta Chat home page advertised with “
Message anyone with an e-mail address even if they don’t use Delta Chat”. With the Instant Onboarding and instant message delivery release end May 31 2024 the primary communication had changed. No longer was Delta Chat trying to be an e-mail client but an easy-to-use instant messenger with onboarding that requires no private data (like e-mail address and password). This was the new home page (and still is, largely unmodified):
This revised home page mentions e-mail only in a secondary note, even thought chatmail is still using many e-mail standards but in the background, not foreground, and tuned and refined to nurture a strictly end-to-end encrypted federated ecosystem with chatmail relays in Banghalore, Johannesburg, Teheran, Montevideo or Kamtschatka as well as in numerous European countries and North-American states. Any chatmail relay beats expensive classic e-mail providers in terms of performance and avoidance of keeping any data for longer times. In the last year usage has dramatically increased, as have contributions and overall ecosystem happenings. So that bigger project change was not all for the worst.
Personally, i use delta a lot for un-encrypted communications from my classic profile and see all of its shortcomings and can thus easily sympathize with your or @raiden 's frustrations. Still, i think it’s the right direction for the delta project to focus on chatmail instead of classic e-mail. For what we are trying to do, it doesn’t matter that much if I and probably you and a few others, as hackers or expert users, have some troubles in using delta for e-mail tasks or with non-dc contacts. I can also use mutt (which i still do) after all. There are no precise numbers but the vast majority of users onboards via chatmail relays, even a majority of Fediverse users . The default onboarding chatmail relay processes 2.3 Million messages a day, with around 500K active addresses. Our discussions and next development targets aim to lay the ground for billions of people onboarding into the chatmail ecosystem. Call us crazy if you will 
Be assured that there is a vivid discussion in contributor circles about classic e-mail use cases, and several are interested to see that side improve. Delta Chat is, after all, a pretty well working e-mail client even with all the shortcomings and the horror of gray mail icon avatars. When and how we get to do improvements to classic e-mail usage, we’ll see. Not soon, likely. If there is a UX/UI-developer team that would like to fork delta chat and boost its classic e-mail side, with a new branding, we’d be willing to support that. We generally are welcoming to forks if there is potential mutual benefit and good faith. Antagonistic forks are only a last resort and carry a high risk to fizzle out, so usually it’s better to try mutually beneficial forking first.