# Is delta chat spam resistant? **URL:** \ **Category:** Mutual Help\ **Tags:** moderation\ **Created:** [December 14, 2025, 12:09pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467 "2025-12-14T12:09:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![session](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/65b543/32.png) [@session](https://forum.delta.chat/u/session)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 12:09pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/1 "2025-12-14T12:09:27Z")
I’m new on delta chat and have tested all just with my own accounts… so not really in real live. I like delta chat a lot but before i introduce the app to my friends i have one question: Is delta chat spam resistant ? Or do we have to fight spam at the end the same way as we have to do it while we use regular Emails ? It seams to me that delta chat has not really a resistant way to deal with spam. We can block contacts - but how to prevent in the first place that we get bothered by all kinds of strangers if they got hold on our address / QR Code ? A new Contact request will reach us even with an alert on our mobile devises. What can we do if your our contact detail got shared publicity and spamers use it for their mission ? Do i miss something ? Thanks for your help ---
**Author:** ![WofWca](https://forum.delta.chat/user_avatar/forum.delta.chat/wofwca/32/1702_2.png) [@WofWca](https://forum.delta.chat/u/WofWca)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 12:48pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/2 "2025-12-14T12:48:20Z")
I’m not someone who’s in charge of the Delta Chat’s philosophy on this front, but: > [@session](#): > > Is delta chat spam resistant ? Not sure if this is much about the Delta Chat clients rather than the email providers, namely the now pushed for [“Chatmail”](https://chatmail.at/). If you use Delta Chat with a regular email provider (such as Gmail, Outlook) and not Chatmail (e.g. the default Delta Chat provider), then you do get messages from spammers, as “Contact Requests”. There are some ideas about having contact requests in a separate section, or showing just one notification when you get a contact request, instead of doing that on each message. See more about the common email spam and Chatmail in the blog post below. In short: if they don’t have your invite link / QR, they can’t message you. > **[Delta Chat: Chatmail - replicable, fast and secure chatting infrastructure...](https://delta.chat/en/2023-12-13-chatmail#how-to-make-e-mail-spammers-sad-and-users-safe)** > > Today, we are unveiling chatmail services, making onboarding with Delta Chat a breeze, with peace of mind: Convenience: Get a chatmail address in a few seconds Privacy: No questions asked, no name,... > [@session](#): > > but how to prevent in the first place that we get bothered by all kinds of strangers if they got hold on our address / QR Code ? > [@session](#): > > What can we do if your our contact detail got shared publicity and spamers use it for their mission ? With Chatmail servers, there is a difference between having someone’s email address and having someone’s QR. If they only have an email address, they can’t message you: the server will reject unencrypted email. The idea is to just not post your QR / invite code publicly, evident by the fact that there is an “Only share it with the people you trust” warning when copying your invite link. See a bit more about this in [FAQ - Delta Chat](https://delta.chat/en/help#howtoe2ee) and [Why can I only add friends using QR codes and links?](https://support.delta.chat/t/why-can-i-only-add-friends-using-qr-codes-and-links/3931). If you _have_ posted your invite link publicly already, there is a button to “reset QR”, which will make it no longer work, i.e. people cannot get in contact with you using that QR / invite link. A new QR will then be generated which you can then share with “the people you trust”. * * * Another “tip”: some people utilize multiple Delta Chat profiles / accounts for various “trust circles”. Some more public, some less. Perhaps somewhat related: - [Secure Invite Links by default](https://support.delta.chat/t/secure-invite-links-by-default/4054) ---
**Author:** ![session](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/65b543/32.png) [@session](https://forum.delta.chat/u/session)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 1:28pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/3 "2025-12-14T13:28:07Z")
> [@WofWca](#): > > If you _have_ posted your invite link publicly already, there is a button to “reset QR”, which will make it no longer work, i.e. people cannot get in contact with you using that QR / invite link. A new QR will then be generated which you can then share with “the people you trust”. Very Nice - did not know about that… so we can do such resets every time after we shared the code to a new person and after contact is established 🙂 But what about when a contact is sharing the details of my account form with in the app - so without the OR code? ---
**Author:** ![link2xt](https://forum.delta.chat/user_avatar/forum.delta.chat/link2xt/32/1971_2.png) [@link2xt](https://forum.delta.chat/u/link2xt)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 1:54pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/4 "2025-12-14T13:54:31Z")
> [@session](#): > > Is delta chat spam resistant ? Or do we have to fight spam at the end the same way as we have to do it while we use regular Emails ? Delta Chat does not have spam reporting and “platform moderation” tools because it is essentially peer-to-peer, the clients exchange messages with each other. Unlike messengers that have discovery by phone number, your profile is not discoverable without you sharing a QR code or invite link or one of your contacts sharing your contact to someone else. Most problems with having your contact shared too widely can be avoided by having separate profiles, e.g. your family profile and your “public” profile in case you need to share it to strangers. If you use chatmail relay, you also cannot receive unencrypted mails and your email address is random, so nobody except the relay operator can send you unencrypted spam. We also want to add an option to drop incoming unencrypted messages and enable it by default as a protection against unencrypted spam: > > > We currently have an \`is\_chatmail\` config option that is set automatically when …you connect to an IMAP server that has \`XCHATMAIL\` capability. This roughly means that the server is a \[chatmail relay\](https://github.com/chatmail/relay) and can only process encrypted messages\[^1\], so UIs disable some features like adding contacts by email address, hides settings that are related to folders like \`mvbox\_move\` and changes available options for \`delete\_server\_after\`. > > This distinction between chatmail and non-chatmail profiles does not work well for multi-transport (https://github.com/chatmail/core/issues/7357) as the user can start with a non-chatmail profile, but then add a chatmail transport and set it as the primary address. > > As the primary distinction between chatmail and non-chatmail is the ability to work with unencrypted messages, unencrypted chats and email-address-contacts, the idea is to add a setting "enable unencrypted messaging" that is disabled by default for all profiles and can be manually enabled if the user want to use the client for unencrypted messaging. > > If the setting is turned off, the client will drop all unencrypted messages into trash chat. UIs can also use this setting to decide whether to allow adding a contact by email address and whether to allow creating a new unencrypted chat, instead of using \`is\_chatmail\` for this. > > One exception is NDNs. NDNs should still be processed for now even though they are not encrypted. It is not clear we really want to keep processing them and displaying errors especially with multi-transport where one failing transport does not mean you need to worry, but for this issue changing how we work with NDNs is out of scope, let's see how it works in practice first. > > \[^1\]: Operator can configure exceptions for some addresses and otherwise customize the relay, but we likely don't want to support this long term. ---
**Author:** ![session](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/65b543/32.png) [@session](https://forum.delta.chat/u/session)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 3:15pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/5 "2025-12-14T15:15:01Z")
> [@link2xt](#): > > Most problems with having your contact shared too widely can be avoided by having separate profiles, e.g. your family profile and your “public” profile in case you need to share it to strangers. True - and we can turn of notifications for a “public” profile so we will not get bothered by all kinds of strangers to load and also for trusted circles like “Family” an extra “family” profile will make it work - for sure … but what about if we want act in groups of 50 members and more… with what kind of profile should act here? Our contacts details will like be shared - so this is a case for the “public” profile - right ? What about creating for every lager group we want to act in an extra profile - is this the way to set things up ? I guess yes - right? ---
**Author:** ![Minim](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ccd318/32.png) [@Minim](https://forum.delta.chat/u/Minim)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 4:10pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/6 "2025-12-14T16:10:41Z")
Yes, a separate profile for each large group is a very good idea! DeltaChat is mostly designed for small groups, though. The moderation tools needed for very large groups do not yet exist. ---
**Author:** ![link2xt](https://forum.delta.chat/user_avatar/forum.delta.chat/link2xt/32/1971_2.png) [@link2xt](https://forum.delta.chat/u/link2xt)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2025, 4:26pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/7 "2025-12-14T16:26:30Z")
Yes, having a profile for each event or internet community is probably a good idea. I.e. you can create a profile “Me @ FOSDEM 2026” and share it with people you get to know at FOSDEM. In practice I usually don’t do this and this did not result in any problems in years. Having a publicly joinable online community is generally a not supported usecase for Delta Chat (that’s also why we have this Discourse forum), but if you want to experiment with this anyway, definitely use a separate profile. It’s probably also not very interesting to spam Delta Chat users because unlike emails addresses and phone numbers as a spammer you cannot compile a spam list from e.g. hacked online shops sorted by country or interests. Just not being contactable by the phone number or email address that you use for registrations is greatly reducing the risk of receiving spam. ---
**Author:** ![session](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/65b543/32.png) [@session](https://forum.delta.chat/u/session)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2025, 10:35pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/8 "2025-12-15T22:35:48Z")
> so we can do such resets every time after we shared the code to a new person and after contact is established It would be nice if we could also defined inviting QR Code/ links which work just one time. ---
**Author:** ![Minim](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ccd318/32.png) [@Minim](https://forum.delta.chat/u/Minim)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2025, 7:28pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/9 "2025-12-17T19:28:33Z")
> [@session](#): > > It would be nice if we could also defined inviting QR Code/ links which work just one time. Suggested and extensively discussed: > [@Secure Invite Links by default](https://support.delta.chat/t/secure-invite-links-by-default/4054): > > Could we crack down on ensuring that its easy to keep invite links secure? Currently: Easiest way to add somebody is via invite link to their profile Unless you manually reset the QR code, no real way to differentiate people. Especially because we just trust their name as declared Safer: Generate invite link per contact. When creating the link, user should specify name. This is something that SMS actually gets pretty corrrect. Incoming messages have opaque number until user decides on na… ---
**Author:** ![andreasva](https://forum.delta.chat/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/57b2e6/32.png) [@andreasva](https://forum.delta.chat/u/andreasva)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2025, 10:44am UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/10 "2025-12-24T10:44:05Z")
Oh noooooooo, please do that not! I collect the links of my contacts. If a link works one time only I will loose contacts, if I have to reinstall on a new device after the old device is defect. DeltaChat becomes more and more paranoid. On this way DeltaChat will become a contact destroyer. It is not still my daily driver messenger. So I have to move back to classy e-mail. DeltaChat isn’t still an easy to use e-mail messenger. It’s now a closed communication tool for paranoid people with an tinfoil hat. I miss the old time when DeltaChat was just an simple e-mail messenger where you could choice to use encrypted messages or unencrypted simple e-mails. I’m done with DeltaChat since the update around March/April 2025. I moved back to Thunderbird and unencrypted classy e-mails. Merry Christmas …and good bye! ---
**Author:** ![r10s](https://forum.delta.chat/user_avatar/forum.delta.chat/r10s/32/1513_2.png) [@r10s](https://forum.delta.chat/u/r10s)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2026, 3:29pm UTC](https://forum.delta.chat/t/is-delta-chat-spam-resistant/4467/11 "2026-10-06T15:29:05Z")