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DeltaChat Bridge

Here's a quietly clever one: talk to your assistant over plain email. DeltaChat is an encrypted messenger that rides on ordinary email accounts, and this bridge gives it a bot on the other end. Email the bot, and your message goes to the hive; the reply arrives as a chat message in the same conversation. No chat server to run, no app to mandate — if you can send an email, you can reach your hive. It's a HiveMind satellite that happens to speak email, relaying utterances to hivemind-core.

In a nutshell

  • Runs as the hm-deltachat-bridge console command, relaying between an email account and hivemind-core.
  • Needs two credential sets: an email account for DeltaChat and the stored HiveMind node identity.
  • The bridge client needs at minimum allow-msg "speak".

DeltaChat is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that rides on ordinary email — any mailbox works as its transport, so there is no separate chat server to run. To people chatting with it, the bot looks like a normal DeltaChat contact.

Beginner's mental model

You give the bridge two sets of credentials: an email account (so it can send and receive DeltaChat messages) and your HiveMind identity (so it can talk to hivemind-core). It sits in the middle and relays between the two.

Install

pip install HiveMind-deltachat-bridge

This installs the hm-deltachat-bridge console command.

Set your HiveMind identity

The bridge reads its HiveMind connection (access key, password, host) from the stored node identity. Set it once on the machine that will run the bridge:

hivemind-client set-identity

If no identity is stored and you don't pass the connection flags manually, the bridge exits with NodeIdentity not set.

Usage

Usage: hm-deltachat-bridge [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --email TEXT           DeltaChat email address for the bot
  --email-password TEXT  Password for that email account
  --key TEXT             HiveMind access key (default: from identity file)
  --password TEXT        HiveMind password (default: from identity file)
  --host TEXT            HiveMind host (default: from identity file)
  --port INTEGER         HiveMind port (default: 5678)

Example:

hm-deltachat-bridge \
  --email bot@example.com \
  --email-password "s3cr3t"

HiveMind flags are optional

--key, --password, and --host only override what's already stored by hivemind-client set-identity. In the common case you set the identity once and pass just the two email flags.

Advanced: host normalization and shutdown

If --host is given without a scheme it is rewritten to ws://<host>. The command blocks until it receives an exit signal (Ctrl-C), then cleanly stops the bridge node.

How it works

The bridge runs as a HiveMind client. An incoming DeltaChat message becomes a recognizer_loop:utterance BUS message sent to hivemind-core. The speak response is delivered back to the originating DeltaChat conversation.

Permissions

The bridge client needs at minimum permission to receive spoken replies:

hivemind-core allow-msg "speak" <id>

Grant additional message types if your use case needs them.

Source

Validated against the HiveMind source: