D-Mail

What is D-Mail?

D-Mail (short for Discrete Mail) turns an email address into a direct-message identity. It’s still email under the hood — reachable at the same address, carried by the same mail servers — but Eon Phoenix presents it completely differently in your inbox: as a chat-style conversation with one contact, rather than a list of separate messages.

D-Mail is always end-to-end encrypted with Eon Phoenix’s hybrid post-quantum scheme — there’s no “unencrypted D-Mail” option. If Eon Phoenix can’t find a usable encryption key for the person you’re chatting with, it refuses to send rather than quietly falling back to something less secure.

Your inbox shows email and D-Mail side by side, clearly labeled, for example:

[Email]  Subject: Invoice Q2
[D-Mail] Subject: Encryption key update

Starting and using a conversation

Open or start a D-Mail conversation from the inbox the same way you’d open any item — pick an existing conversation, or start a new one and type in the contact’s address. Type your message in the chat box at the bottom and send; replies from your contact appear in the same thread.

Subject threads

A D-Mail conversation with one contact can carry several separate sub-conversations at once, grouped by an optional subject. Leave the subject blank for a running, general chat; set a subject (shown as a small bar above the message box) to start — or continue — a labeled sub-thread within the same conversation, for example “Project X” or “Trip planning.” The chat view shows a labeled divider each time the subject changes, so separate topics with the same contact stay visually distinct without opening a whole new conversation. Because the subject travels inside the encrypted message itself, it never appears in plain text to anything carrying the mail along the way.

Read-once messages

Any message in a D-Mail conversation can be sent with the read-once (burn-after-reading) option turned on. Your own copy always stays visible to you, marked as sent read-once; for your recipient, opening it reveals the content once — after that, reopening the conversation shows only that it was burned. Just seeing a new-message notification or a background refresh does not burn it; only your recipient actually opening it does.

Discrete conversations

D-Mail conversations support the same Discrete toggle described in Encrypted mail. The default discrete level hides the cleartext tags Eon Phoenix uses to label and group your messages at rest in your recipient’s mailbox — it does not, by itself, hide who you’re talking to, since the real addresses are still needed to deliver the mail. A second, stronger Discrete (full) level asks a cooperating mail gateway to substitute disposable tokens for your addresses while the message is in transit; that only works between organizations that have set gateways up with each other in advance. See Encrypted mail for the full breakdown of what each level protects.

Encrypted group chat

Besides one-to-one conversations, D-Mail also supports encrypted group chats. Click the group icon next to Compose in the sidebar, give the group a name, and enter your contacts’ email addresses (comma-separated) to create it — Eon Phoenix looks up an encryption key for every member first and refuses to create the group if it can’t find one for someone, the same fail-closed behavior as a regular D-Mail. Once created, the group appears in your inbox list alongside your other conversations, labeled with its name and a post-quantum group badge.

A group chat works like a D-Mail conversation with more than one other person in it: everyone’s messages appear in one shared, end-to-end encrypted thread, each labeled with its sender, and the whole group is kept in sync every time you open it. Groups don’t currently support subject threads or the read-once/Discrete modifiers available in one-to-one D-Mail.

Deleting

You can remove a single message from a conversation, or delete an entire conversation, from the chat view. Deleting removes it from your own view; it does not reach into your contact’s mailbox.

D-Mail vs. regular email, at a glance