Projects / deltachat-homeassistant-addon
deltachat-homeassistant-addon
How this came about
After building the Browser Edition of Delta Chat Desktop, I started experimenting with Home Assistant addons. I built a few small ones - a webscraper to show when friends are online on Steam, and a collector for chatmail relay user counts from their metrics endpoints.1 While reading the addon documentation I discovered that you can integrate your own web UI into Home Assistant, and the idea of embedding the Delta Chat Browser Edition there was born.
What it does
The addon runs Delta Chat Desktop's Browser Edition inside a Home Assistant addon container. You get a full Delta Chat client accessible through your Home Assistant dashboard - no separate app needed.
Right now it's a proof of concept: all users share the same account and only one browser session can be active at a time. Messages are decrypted on the Home Assistant instance, not in your browser, so it's not truly end-to-end encrypted anymore.
In the future this could be expanded to actually integrate with Home Assistant: exposing actions so workflows can send Delta Chat messages, or using incoming messages as automation triggers.
Why it matters
More than just running a chat UI in a browser, this proves that Delta Chat core can run inside a Home Assistant addon. That means hosting Delta Chat bots on a Home Assistant instance is feasible. Running bots on Home Assistant is especially appealing because Delta Chat bots have minimal requirements - just an email account.2 No domain, no port forwarding, no public IP needed. And once a bot is packaged as an addon, end users can install it with just a few clicks.
- The public metrics endpoint of chatmail relays has since been removed. So that addon does not work anymore. Also I never published those small addons, they were just little experiments.
- And since chatmail relays exist, you don't even need that - you can get a new chatmail email address with a single click.