Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

and K9 on Android is not a bad client. It seems like people are not aware of it much.

It's the best mobile client I've used, but thats not saying much.

It doesn't make me sad, which is the best I can say about it

I mean, I don't know about you, but that seems to be the fate of any mail client. "Doesn't make me sad" is the highest rating that any mail client, web-based or not, has ever gotten from me.

It's not a /good/ client, either. It's adequate, but has a long way to go to clean up it's UX and normal reading flow.

No argument here. But is it any worse than Thunderbird?

My own take on this point: for my neither trivial nor very advanced needs, K9 at least lacks: - hierarchical display of email threads; - search that actually works.

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.

> search that actually works

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.

That's a bit overkill for a phone. I recommend enabling server side search in Account Settings, much easier on resources.

It doesn't work well either in my experience. Not sure if K9 is really the one to blame, or the IMAP server (Gmail, in my case). As Thunderbird indeed does search locally, it isn't impacted by poor server side search anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion! It was set to 100… that's a terrible default for a phone with 64 GiB onboard storage…

You should try AquaMail. The search works. Threads aren't shows as a tree, sadly, but they are grouped into a folder - not ideal but you can at least follow simple conversations. Still not something for mailing lists.

Additionally, AquaMail can handle nested folders, which K9 doesn't and never will, according to its developers.

Does it allow plain text composing/viewing yet?

Good question, this is also mandatory for me.

It's not free software, unfortunately, so that is a showstopper for me. Thanks for suggestion, though.

with a polished UI it could be better, the protocol and options support are fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com