Opposite stance: please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps. That's tremendous effort, and IMHO too much for what you can do with the priority on Firefox, even with these new Thunderbird hires.
Focus on polishing and maintaining the existing Thunderbird the best you can with the limited resources you have for the project. You have a large existing userbase that will be extremely thankful for that.
Also, frankly, there are so many email clients out there for Android, that it's a pain trying to finding something trustworthy. Thunderbird would be something I can trust.
It doesn't make me sad, which is the best I can say about it
That being said, I'm rather happy with K9, and I'd certainly prefer to see energy spent in making it even better than in making a “Mobile Thunderbird” from scratch.
If search works fast on Thunderbird is because it keeps all emails in your local hdd. To be fair you should also set the option account settings > fetching mail > local folder size to 'all' in K9.
Additionally, AquaMail can handle nested folders, which K9 doesn't and never will, according to its developers.
100% agreed. Thunderbird for many years was (or was perceived as) moribund and now that it's showing more signs of life people are pushing to add mobile clients as well as desktop? Are those people trying to kill it off?
> On May 9, 2017, Philipp Kewisch announced that the Mozilla Foundation will continue to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but that Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.
Just watch the number of supposed independent projects that are created and/or maintained by a small handful of corporations.
And they maintain control what may well be a variant of embrace extend extinguish. Meaning that they churn the code so much with changes that a would be fork has to have the backing of a similarly resourceful organization.
Aquamail is the most feature complete service there was, and now it's been acquired.
A major Thunderbird and Firefox distraction was their shared codebase.
If the new Firefox can do what it can, maybe there could be another codebase that compiles well to multiple platforms, maybe even the first mainstream webassembly app.
But it just isn't thinking far enough outside the box. What they really should do is create an entire Thunderbird OS based on web technologies and XUL, and sell it to mobile phone manufacturers! It could be huge!
I'm full of great ideas. Have they considered that email client interfaces are hard to understand for your grandparents? Maybe they could make it look like your living room, with each piece of email a book on a shelf. And they could have a cute little animatronic talking bluebird that you could ask for help-- call it, I dunno, want something non-threatening... Thunderbird Bob!
One more? Short but sweet-- Thunderbird Vista!
Really, the possibilities are endless.