Thunderbird is coming to Android – in K-9 Mail form The cross platform email client Thunderbird is to launch an Android version, which will be based on the existing K-9 app. A month after Thunderbird's product manager, Ryan Lee Sipes, tweeted that a mobile version of the email client was "coming soon", the project has announced how it will do it. It has acquired the FOSS …
K-9 mail went through an update in July 2021 that made it an absolute POS, and the reviews since then reflect that. The GUI made it awful for navigating multiple accounts, which K-9 mail was excellent at. A huge contingent of K-9 mail users left it or, like myself, reverted to K-9 mail v5.600 and are holding there while evaluating alternatives. But K-9 mail in it's present form is awful. A perfect example of how not to do software.
I use K9 as my mail client on android on my phone and tablet.
I use evolution as my mail client on my PC. It's footprint is much smaller than Thunderbird and offers contacts and calendar integration with google, which I use on android. So K9-Thunderbird integration isn't of much interest to me.
All three devices sync incoming mail perfectly but then I run my own postfix mail server.
I also don't have any issues with the 2021 K9 update: I still have a unified inbox over my 3 mail accounts, though it tends to be a bit slow to refresh, and, of course, I can still see all three individual IMAP accounts.
The only major features I miss in K9 is an ability to print emails, that I have to dig in the headers to view sender email addresses rather than just sender names and that I can't just swipe to mark any spam that gets through my server spam filters as spam (and update my Bayesian classifier).
With respect, may I ask for a better explanation of your position? I am rather new to K-9 (only about 6 months) and find the interface rather "industry standard" in terms of "Integrated Inbox" and drop-down menus to access individual accounts.
Note that this does not mean that it is perfect, UI quirks abound: why is Read/Unread simply an envelope icon without obvious functionality? Why can't I swipe to delete, rather than hold-tap / check selections / tap delete / confirm? Why, if you delete an incoming email from the app first, the notification's Delete / dismiss option is broken?
I personally find K-9's UI simply toes the line to a somewhat 'standardized' interface that is the equivalent paradigm on many other mail clients.
Not everyone wants an Integrated Inbox. v5.6 & earlier, if you turned the Integrated Inbox off, the top level showed each inbox separately with the number of unread emails so you could assess the Inbox situation at a glance. After v5.6, if you have the Integrated Inbox off, you have to poke a few times to gain the same info you had with V5.6 & earlier at a glance. A perfect example of a code monkey not understanding how the product is used. When the user base complained, they were given a big FO.
Again, read the post v5.6 reviews. There's a reason there are almost as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl=en_US&gl=US
Thank you for the clarification, I believe an option to turn off The Integrated Inbox, for those who do not like it, should indeed have remained an option. For me the integration makes things easier, a one-stop view of all my unread emails in a single point - delete, read, or skip. It doesn't make sense for me to have to flip through different accounts just to make sure I haven't missed any recent receipts, it makes sense on a small screen.
> I had to remove my Gmail account because the failure warnings got too annoying and frequent.
Strange, I have K9 poll my Gmail address (I only have because of my Android account) daily, and never had a problem, except when for some reason I didn't poll it for several months. The exception you can set up in your Google account runs out after a given time of inactivity (some months apparently?), but if you keep using it regularly it just keeps working. At least it does for me, I access all my Gmail mails (rare Google stuff) using K9.
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There's an interesting aspect to that. £30 doesn't sound too much for a programme. But paying that every year, as a subscription. No.
I want software that is like a politician. Once it's bought it stays bought.
This is often the problem with free versions. I have the free version of various programmes. I'd happily pay a few quid for a slightly better version. But I'll be damned if I'll pay it over and over again every month for eternity. So I stay on the free versions.
All I want in these circumstance is to have a bit of extra something-or-other. Not for it to be all singing all dancing. Like a Proton mail client that allows me to import my other email accounts. But not the other bits particularly, and certainly not for 4 quid a month.. Every month, forever.
Over the next 20 years* that's going to be around 1000 quid. 1000 quid For an email client. When I can perfectly well use the free version of this, or even get the little bit of functionality I want but don't need from FOSS.
*If I should live so long.
Heyrick, Terry, apologies for that - and I agree with you both.
I didn't know their pricing model had changed. When I got aquamail a few years ago, it was about 5quid I think, and that was a permanent licence, not a subscription.
£30 a year? No chance in hell!
Interestingly, I still get updates, so they haven't forked the subscription version into a new app.
Sorry for the out-of-date advice.
I just looked further - aquamail used to be owned by MobiSystems, but was spun off in March this year.
It looks like Mobisystems are still offering one off perpetual licenses, though still quite expensive (30 euro)
https://www.mobisystems.com/cart/, though I don't know if it will actually work.
/e/'s Mail app is a fork of K9. Like all forks, and like /e/'s other forked apps, (Calendar, Message, Notes etc.), it lags behind upstream when it comes to bug fixes and new features. On my /e/ devices, I just install the upstreams. Or I make a custom build with the upstreams in place of the forks.
I always assumed that if Firefox + Thunderbird = Seamonkey, I may as well go the simplest route and just use Seamonkey.
Also, I don’t have an Android phone, I only got my iPhone SE 1st gen (the one that works with the original FLIR One, which I am also still rocken. Because what the hell good is any stupid cell phone if it doesn’t have FLIR???)
Seamonkey *is* built from the same code, yes, but quite an old version. The Gecko engine in Seamonkey is equivalent to Firefox 60, the ESR release from May 2018.
Personally, while I liked and used the Mozilla Internet Suite, I found it problematic to have the email client in the same binary as my web browser.
I leave my email clients open for days or weeks sometimes. I have a lot of email; the result is that the client can take a lot of RAM.
I try to restart browsers regularly, partly because of their fast refresh cycle.
It is more convenient for them to be separate, for me. I can close a memory-hungry browser and switch to another one. If Firefox needs an update, I use Chrome or _vice versa_. If I need all the RAM for a while, I can close my email.
But when they're the same program, I can't. My browser is always using a few gig more RAM than otherwise because it has all those email accounts open. My email client needs to be restarted for every x.y.Z security release.
TBH I don't need an email client that can render HTML. If someone emails me in HTML format only, it's probably not worth reading. All email needs is *bold*, _underline_ and /italics/ and anything else is a waste of bandwidth.
https://useplaintext.email/
But Thunderbird is *THE* best cross-platform FOSS email client, so I use it.
Hallelujah!
I had Eudora on my first (smart)phone. Resolutely plain text only. Brilliant. And it quoted replies properly too. Qualcomm also did a companion text-only web browser at the time. Really useful in those pre-3G days.
> If someone emails me in HTML format only, it's probably not worth reading.
+1 from me.
-A.
For the benefit of the downvoter(s), let me elaborate...
1. I use the 'More from this sender' option regularly, but it has completely disappeared in the latest version.
2. The menu at the bottom has moved to the top where it is much harder to reach (they may have added an option to move it back down, but 1...)
3. Things that previously took one or 2 presses/swipes take more effort.
It looks nice, but it has lost useful functionality and the user experience is poor compared to version 5.6.
My dad also uses K9 on my recommendation. Recently he complained it wasn't sending emails; they would just sit in his outbox and there was no indication of what had gone wrong.
He asked me to take a look so I checked his settings which were 100% correct, enablrd the debug logs (which seem to mostly UI events).
No matter what I tried, it wouldn't send the emails. He has the latest version, thanks to Google Play updating it (even though it was installed from f-droid originally), so I downloaded 5.600 from GitHub and it now works perfectly.
I am starting to question the judgement of the guys at Mozilla tbh.
I made the same switch to AquaMail, right before AquaMail made the switch to "sketchy owners." Now I'm back to K9 and feel like I'm rapidly running out of options. I wasn't exactly impressed by "we promise we won't read your email no really."
I don't want *anyone* reading my mail (except the NSA, foreign governments, and major crime syndicates, which apparently we don't get a choice about).
Great news!
Hoping for these things too:
SMS Backup+ works very well backing up SMS text messages to a gmail account, once you've set your gmail account to accept "less secure" logins - which you can do temporarily. Taking this under the thunderbird's wing could ensure further support, as well providing backup to email services other than gmail.
MailDroid feature to create IMAP folders to file emails in is handy, some other clients don't have this even though the email provider will support it.
Interesting, I like K-9 - I've been using it for several years now. One of the few client apps that can survive Android's attempts to put it to sleep.
I'm still on an old version of TB though (60.90.1) because of the Virtual Identity plugin that I rely on which is not compatible with newer versions.
I use an Android and perfectly happy with Gmail, which works well and seamlessly with my Android, and iPhone before that. Why is Thunderbird necessary/needed? More clutter? Just like the browsers for Android, they all suck so why do need so many of them? They won't all fit where the sun don't shine.
Because GMail is awful? Because it seems that Google might be forcing it's awfulness on everybody these days - my newer Android...10? 11? phone no longer has the stock email client. It seems it's been consigned to the dustbin, with nice shiny GMail to be used in its place. Nice shiny GMail now with built in video conferencing. WTF?
Have you ever tried to look at the headers of an email in Gmail? I don't think it's even possible these days.
Most phishing emails are easy to spot and if you're happy with Google reading all your emails then it does pick up most phishing attempts, but not all, and I HAVE seen the occasional extremely convincing scam email. In K9 at least you can long press and view the headers. That has saved me and my family on at least one occasion.
Does k-9 have a calendar? I can't see one mentioned.
Will the new TB for Android bring its calendar with?
Currently I have TB on my PCs. And use Outlook.com on my Android phone. The TBSync add-on n the PCs keeps my emails and my calendar in sync And it's the calendar that's the deal breaker.
I still don't get how so many email systems don't have one.
I switched to TB from MS Outlook as soon as it integrated the calendar.
Do other people not have calendar/diary software? Or do the not want it synced across their devices?
Or does every one <shudder> just rely on Google?
I have accepted the fancied up k9 grudgingly. I just want email, text only. I do not want calendars, swipe to do whatever, gestures, etc. This is the reason why I use claws for the computer. I tried using Thunderbird for a while. Things change dramatically out of nowhere. I prefer the ISO style of date/time format, TB broke that by adopting CLDR and not having a custom format option available for *nix. It got "fixed" after a year or so. The reason *nix did not get custom? No API for custom format. Hmm, *nix locale system uses the oldest and most stable style of API like all POSIX systems do. The users' custom format preference can be queried from the command line or programatically using nearly the same syntax. I guess if it does not use object oriented calls and maybe binary blobs, it is not an API. No problem, I'm sure systemd will provide the service shortly.
Time to start looking for a more basic android email client.
In my attempt to tame my emails to some kind of organisation, I use nested folders at some depth.
My IMAP email provider supports it, and it works well on Thunderbird on macOS. But on Windows, Thunderbird wont show some sub-sub-folders.
My suspicion is that, internally, Thunderbird is relying on the host OS's filesystem for storing the folders. Windows is more limited than Unix/Linux for folder path length.
Curiously, em Client on Windows doesn't have this same issue with my folder structure, which leads me to think they've chosen a better way to implement handling of subfolder depth and tested this more rigorously.
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