K-9 Mail is back | Hacker News Reader

K-9 Mail is back

k9mail.app

270 pointsjlelse134 comments

>The user interface has been redesigned. Some of you will love it, some will hate it. You’re welcome and sorry.

This is great, except now all of the UI elements are at the top of the screen, which on modern large phones is very awkward, even with my long fingers. Looking over the github repo, it appears that I'm not the only one with this concern, and that the author isn't interested in making this configurable. Too bad, this is the only thing that is keeping me from upgrading Lineage, as the older version of K-9 will no longer work.

Anyways, thanks for all the hard work. Excellent tool.

I'm in the same position, and I've been considering wading into the misery that is Android app development just long enough to add a setting to move the action bar to the bottom of the screen.

I've also been considering switching to FairEmail, though it has its own share of UI / user flow weirdness.

> This is great, except now all of the UI elements are at the top of the screen, which on modern large phones is very awkward, even with my long fingers.

I've always found it easier to reach the top of the phone than the bottom, so his sentence is spot on: Some love it, other like you hate it.

Interesting. How do you hold your phone with one hand, in such a way that it is secure, and you aren't accidentally hitting the buttons, or having the meat of your hand make contact with the screen?

My pinky is normally a hard stop for the bottom of the phone,so that I don't have to apply much pressure with my other fingers or the meat of my hand. My thumb therefore can reach the bottom half of the phone easily, but needs to be readjusted to reach the top.

This image leads me to believe that I'm not the only one with this problem: https://www.apptentive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Screen...

Not the original author of the comment but I share the preference. I hold my phone often by the sides; the edge of my palm is a bit higher than the edge of my phone and is not supporting it from below. A bit like this but without the assistive strap and my fingers actually wrap around the phone a bit more: https://images.app.goo.gl/oxvXQRVBg38oTjnH6

My hands are somewhat skinny so the meat of my hand doesn't interfere but I think my phone case also has to do with this. My grip seems rare, I couldn't find images of it.

I can't use my pinky as a hard stop always, because if I do it for long enough, I'd get some pain in my joints.

I switch between grips depending on what I do. My texting grip is the one people usually have and I switch to it by pushing my phone with my body to guide it down my palm.

I share your “rare grip” precisely and also adopted it to alleviate pinky pain. To add another anecdote to the pile I also prefer UI elements at the top although a toggle in settings or at least a configuration file would be best. I don’t understand my own preferences on this issue though because the arguments for the bottom position are completely convincing to me. (Thumb is closer, top of screen is better used for displaying messages, etc)

K-9 Mail also has Auto-Encrypt which automatically encrypts/decrypts email with public key on the OpenKeychain.

I used it for sending and receiving WhatsApp message over email in order to remove it from the phone and isolating it in a VM[1].

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/send-and-receive-whatsapp-message...

I switched from GMail to a paid SMTP service and had been using the gmail client until I found out about the K-9 beta. Super pleased with it so far, and its nice to have every step of my mail from server to client (that I can reasonably control) open source!

I highly recommend giving a little via Librapay or GitHub sponsors if you use the app and want to see it keep long term support ;)

https://liberapay.com/k9mail/donate

https://github.com/sponsors/cketti

How was the paid STMP service you were using? Been trying to find one and most seem to be used for email marketing/spam, so it's hard to know what would work reliably for small scale personal email.

Postfix on BSD is bulletproof.

Irrelevant. The GP asked for a paid SMTP service. GP, FastMail is very good.

edoceo, the reason your flippant comment is irrelevant and unhelpful is that running an SMTP service means dealing with often intractable deliverability problems that are only surmountable by having your mail sent by a server that sends a large volume of legitimate email to build reputation as a sender.

It doesn't matter if you use postfix, exim, sendmail, BSD, Linux, or TempleOS, or manually wiggle magnets towards an open socket to send email, the reason the GP wants paid SMTP is so that he can rent access to a server with adequate deliverability to actually use his email.

Hmm, I've been running my own SMTP server on a VPS for over a decade with very few issues.

Yea, same - and since it costs me $5/mo I view it as a paid solution.

Do you have good deliverabikity to Google and MS hosted mailboxen?

Once I implemented DKIK and SPF, I had very few issues with Gmail. The biggest issues I’ve had were with corporate self-hosted exchange servers (my job inquiries at a particular company went unanswered and, when I contacted via an alternate channel, I heard that my mail had ended up in a “clutter” box

I keep a Gmail for that exact reason.

Huh that's all that's required to stay out of gmail's junk folders? DKIM and SPF?

Could had sworn there were a lot more work/tech required, a couple of years ago.

I did the DMARC stuff too. It's working great. I'm low volume tho, and there is never UCE sent from my setup.

Yeah if you got the first two, I automatically assume DMARC is used too. But am not familiar with "UCE"?

Also did you have to research your IP/domain that your VPS sits behind? Domain blacklists, and avoiding them, seems pretty straightforward. But I've heard mixed things about VPS ips, some mail services could block whole networks from VPS providers while others don't care as long as you don't spam?

UCE is the name for Spam in Postfix docs. Unsolicited Commercial Email.

"Nobody ever told me they didn't get my messages they didn't know about!"

I've been using mxroute.com for my business and personal emails for 6 months.

Anecdotal, but my biggest client has said my emails no longer tend to hit his spam folder since I've made the switch.

I use ddvault's recommended service, migadu.com. Not for everyone, and they had a little fiasco with their free service in the past (they no longer offer free service), but I have had zero issue with it and it supports essentially infinite domains for no additional charge, which I really like.

Others recommended fastmail which I also like. Some people have concerns with it because it is based in Australia, which a couple years ago passed some pretty far-reaching data subpoena laws, but they don't seem too concerned about it: https://fastmail.blog/privacy-security/advocating-for-privac...

My comment on this isn't very helpful since I just started paying a few days ago, but smooth sailing so far!

Been a happy Fastmail customer for years now and it's been smooth sailing the whole time (using custom domains and everything). No issues whatssoever.

But yeah, Australia is not... Optimal, privacy wise. Poor data laws and member of the Five Eyes network will probably force me, finally, to switch to a new service (probably Proton mail) at the end of the next yearly renewal :(

Edit: just remembered there's been a couple of incidents with poor security practices, in the past, with fastmail (easy to google) that doesn't look flattering.

And I think (?) there's been some issues with spoofed email going around/originated within fastmail's internal network:

"Fastmail domains have a DMARC policy of none, which means recipient mail servers should report whether the message passes or not, but not change deliverability. This allows users to send mail using our domains from anywhere, for legacy reasons."

From the final section on https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/senderauthentication.... I think this was abused?

Funny enough, I switched from protonmail to migadu. As I've learned more about cryptography and modern email, the promises they make about email don't hold up well.

If you really need to talk to someone over email securely, PGP over email is the way to go.

That's too bad :( Haven't done any research on proton yet, so I know nothing about them besides their own claims. You got any references to share?

I've never had the need to protect my mail (using PGP for example) as I don't send mails that's sensitive enough for it or are forced to message with tech illiterate people (sorry) that can't use it.

I just want a privacy friendly service that won't give up my data to uninvolved 3rd parties :(

Well migadu, like Proton technologies, is based in Switzerland.

A lot of it comes down to reading over a company's privacy policy (if you can't understand it / its really long, that's a red flag), where they are located, and -- important -- if its free or paid.

Here's the write-up that convinced me to switch: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...

Protonmail is mentioned in the footnotes.

Looks perfect, thanks for the recommendation! It reminds me a lot of NearlyFreeSpeech, only for email instead of web hosting.

For another paid SMTP solution, Amazon's SES has been bulletproof for me. They also really grill you on what purpose you intend to use it before letting you in. My mail volume is so low I still haven't seen a bill.

I was tempted but had an AWS runaway 5-figure bill at work once - I think someone forgot to shut down an EC2 instance - which has scared me from using them for personal projects. I heard they're usually understanding in those situations and have features to limit your bill, but that feels like overkill for personal email.

I've been using Mailbox.org for nearly 2 years now and are happy with them, never had a problem. Hosted in Germany, you are able to use your own domain + catchall if needed.

As noted in the blog post of this new release, K-9 is looking for more funding. Earlier this year a call for donations (https://k9mail.app/2021/02/14/K-9-Mail-is-looking-for-fundin...) was quite successful, but the goal of $1000 per week is not yet met. It is currently at $770, so let's get it to $1000!

Oh, nice. I see it's on F-Droid, which is worth mentioning. My own phone is set up for F-Droid only; no Google.

Not only is the new stable there, cketti has been posting all of the betas leading up to this on F-Droid for quite awhile. :) You have to manually look once in awhile in the F-Droid client for newer beta builds to opt into using.

Unfortunately 5.800 is not yet on F-Droid. I am looking forward to it.

F-Droid builds in batches, about 3 days per batch (see monitor.f-droid.org). All the APKs are signed at once and published together so it should show up soon. Per the dev, the last beta is essentially what became the stable release so you could start today and just upgrade in a bit.

The only change between 5.740 (available on F-Droid right now) and 5.800 are updated translations.

The betas have been great indeed!

You can enable the 'Unstable updates' option in F-Droid's settings to receive notifications for new beta versions to avoid having to check manually. The downside is that you'll receive these updates for all apps, so be sure to check if a new version is a beta version for apps that you want to keep on stable versions.

> This version of K-9 Mail only runs on Android 5.0 and newer.

That's an impressive "only"! Android 5.0 was released ín 2014.

It's a real shame that nowadays 7 year old devices are considered to be out of scope for support even though they would still be perfectly fine otherwise.

Fuck google etc. and this whole throw-away society.

Not supporting old OSes is fine. The blame is squarely on the phone manufacturer for not allowing upgrades to OSes that receive security patches.

How do you imagine budget or mid-class 7 year old phones running a new Android release? The specs are too weak.

I would say the bloat is too big. The difference between Android 2 and 9 is some fine grained permissions.UI is the same.

I agree, the bloat is significant. To nitpick, I'd say that the UI has actually worsened between 2 and modern versions.

You expect that none of Android would work but all of K-9 should work?

Yes. K9 hasn't bloated much over the years, and I've been using it for the past 10 years so I'm quite certain of this.

That's not really a fair assessment. The Nexus 4 was released in 2012 and runs Android 5.1. The devices that didn't get Android 5 are pretty much a decade old. And essentially all of them can be rooted and upgraded to a more modern version of Android, if you want to. Do you want to, though? Probably not: even if the batteries in them still held a decent charge, the devices that didn't get Android 5 almost all have less than 1gb of RAM (Nexus S had 348MB non-gpu memory) and only one or two CPU cores, with a bunch of older devices shipping without 3g. Having internal storage measured in gigabytes was at the upper end of the market (Nexus One, Google's flagship device from 2010, had 190 megabytes of app storage). "Perfectly fine otherwise" really doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of folks who use their phones more than any other device (hours each day).

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X220 released in 2011, and running the current Debian.

Did Lenovo push the current Debian to your device? Have the apps when you bought your laptop increased in resource use by an order of magnitude?

It's not the same kind of device running with the same constraints. Phones were pushing the limits of miniaturization. The difference in the underlying technology is vastly different. Comparing a laptop from 2002 trying to run the current Debian is more apt.

I don't understand what you're getting at. I bought this X220 about a year ago on Craigslist for $100 and installed Debian on it. The main app on it whose resource use has bloated a lot since 2011 is Firefox, and that's a persistent sore point for me, since it's the web that has bloated rather than just the browser. The other stuff I use (mostly Emacs, Python, and Xchat) hasn't really bloated. I have a Thinkpad X40 (from 2004) that I used for similar purposes but its hardware eventually got too flaky.

I would say I keep a lot more data on the X220 (using a 0.5TB SATA SSD) than I could store on the X40 which had a 40GB PATA drive. It had USB2 and SD card ports though, so I could in principle have added a high capacity SD card or whatever. The X61 of the same era is still a viable machine and I think it had a SATA drive slot, which means it would be pretty usable with today's ssd's.

I am sure you get Lineage OS, or something like it to run great on an old phone, just as I am sure you installed Debian yourself.

Mostly when we are talking about phones getting upgrades or not getting upgrades any more it is about updates from the manufacturer, so I don't see where you are going.

I think that is not so easy but I haven't looked into it too much. Only a limited set of phones work with it and I think their functionality is also limited. I do have a Nokia N900 from around 2008, but despite its coolness it has never really been usable (too slow and too small).

I'm using an Android which has seen two battery replacements in ~5 years, and it still holds a charge for 2-3 days.

All apps I use in regular life (Youtube, Google Maps, Gmail, Signal, a shopping list, music player, virtual train ticket) run absolutely without issue. I'm sure they'd run at 30FPS more if I bought a new phone, but this is a tool, not a toy.

In fact, the biggest issue I'm running into is exactly what parent said. Thoughtless companies (like my credit card issuer) just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years.

> just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years

How is this the app developer's fault? There's plenty of Linux, macOS, and Windows software that only runs on recent kernels because they use new APIs. Why would ANY developer target OSs that the overwhelming majority of their users don't actually use, skipping out on supporting modern functionality?

Edit: Really eager to hear from the folks downvoting about their great experiences bending over backwards to support SDKs from 2013 to target devices that literally can't even connect to a mobile network anymore.

The OP said old devices, not old OS versions. In other words, the lack of software support is the problem, not the hardware.

I used a smartphone that was released in 2014 until the end of 2020. It worked perfectly fine, and would have continued to work perfectly fine—except for the software. The GPS date rollover happened and there was no official update to fix it to the new epoch. VoLTE support in custom ROMs was impossible (because this feature is locked in a closed-source binary blob), so it couldn’t make phone calls once my provider turned off their 3G network. Otherwise, it was fast and worked fine.

When I gave up and looked for a replacement, I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone. Lower-resolution non-OLED screens, lower benchmark scores, no wireless charging, no waterproofing, no replaceable batteries, no unlocked bootloaders. The idea that newer hardware is objectively superior is simply untrue.

I had a similar situation, where my 2015 Samsung S6 still seemed as good or better than most the mid to low range phones I saw in 2020, and open source support for the old phone through Lineage was spotty at best (one person would update new releases maybe). I eventually got a Samsung A51 which has about equivalent specs in most cases but has a slightly bigger screen.

It's sad how mostly fine hardware (just one replaceable component is bad) gets left behind, but it's not entirely limited to phones. A couple years back I had to replace the main board of my son's computer because the old gateway it was that came with windows 7 or 8 and that was updated to windows 10 stopped being supported in one of the fall or spring patch rollups. Windows 10 had worked on the computer for about a year, that mainboard wasn't supported in the update, so the update never applied cleanly. I understand dropping old system support eventually (even though the Linux kernel still supports everything, that doesn't always mean you can get really old systems to boot a modern distro without problem), but I would rather it wasn't mid-way through the OS lifetime. :/

Modern low- to midrange phones certainly have more RAM and storage than your 2014 phone, which matters more than the raw benchmark scores.

> I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone

Slower hardware doesn't mean equally outdated, and I honestly can't back up your claim with any data. A $30 Android Tracphone on Amazon has 1-2 orders of magnitude more storage, a 50% bigger battery, twice the cores, a bigger screen, better camera, and 4g (compared to the flagship phones in 2011).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09238C448/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fa...

The features you mention (wireless charging, screen type) have nothing to do with app or OS support.

> most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone.

Unlikely. Top of the line then was a Note 4; 3 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, Snapdragon 805 quad-core (Geekbench 5 score--around 154/449).

Mid-range now--

Motorola One 5G Ace, $349 https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-battery-Unlocked-Camera-Silv...

6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, Geekbench 5 score 660/1888

PLUS 5 G

So-2x RAM, 4x storage, 4x CPU + 5G.

At about half of the price of the Note 4 when it came out.

I think you’re probably right about the performance (though I did typo ‘2021’ instead of ‘2020’, so the specific model you mention wasn’t available at the time). I do remember feeling very surprised that contemporary mid-range phones seemed to have worse benchmarks on PassMark, but my old phone model (Galaxy S5) seems to be conspicuously absent as I look again, so I wonder if there was a data issue. It’s also possible that I misread something, or that the devices I was looking at weren’t representative of the best of the mid-range market at the time due to carrier restrictions and essential-to-me features (e.g. headphone jack) that have been getting cut from newer phones.

In any case, I regret bringing this specific point up, both because I try not to say things which are inaccurate, but also because I feel like it has distracted from the main point: my old phone did everything that most people do on their phones (phone calls, chats, video streaming, music streaming, web browsing, light gaming) with no performance/memory/storage problems, had a (subjectively) better feature set than many more recent models, and the only reason I had to buy a new one anyway was because the manufacturer made it impossible to keep the software up-to-date.

The OP said old devices, but in response to someone complementing support for old software -- you can see where the change in topic might lead to difficulties in communication?

Unfortunately, board support packages from the system-on-chip manufacturer limit kernel upgrades. Even then, Project Treble should make it easier to upgrade to newer versions of higher-level components. But Treble was introduced with Android 8.0, so while newer phones should be able to be upgraded more easily, that doesn't help hardware of the era you're referring to.

In any case, the problem isn't with app developers and older versions of Android -- although I'm happy that many try to mitigate the hardware vendors' lack of support. It's that phone hardware is insufficiently open or standardised (in contrast to x86) meaning that OS vendors can't support it.

Most devices I have seen gets 2-3 years of updates, so you are looking at devices that are about a decade old at that point: exactly how long do you think it is fair that the manufacturer pays for updates to your phone?

My thought on this is, if you cannot update the device yourself, manufacturers should be mandated to support the device for 4 or 5 years past last point of sale.

If they unlock it, and release full sources so you can access all the hardware in alternative builds, then fine, they can drop support when they please.

It isn't an either/or, in my world they could keep it locked for 3 or 4 years, providing full updates, then provide unlock and a year later drop security updates.

My point is, security updates need to come before profit, and no one should be selling phones a year before updates end. Or even, not even do updates!

That actually sounds pretty fair, with the proviso that I would say 4 years after the sale of the phone, rather than that phone model.

But given that we are talking about Androids here, why should they be required to release full source? Shouldn't it be enough that they release driver code?

Sure, I think the key part is sources so you can fully support the hardware yourself.

No, not supporting 7 year old software is not the same as not supporting 7 year old hardware. My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!). Of course, my 2012 Nexus 7 is more obsolete than an iBook G4 by this point. Why? Because in 2012, phones and tablets were basically insecure little toys compared to what they are today. We witnessed the birth of a new computer market, and like the 90s era of computing, it generated landfills worth of eWaste. You can argue (validly!) that some of it was obsoleted quicker than necessary due to poor support or bloated software, but let’s face it; by and large, old phones and tablets are the victims of progress. The 2012 Nexus 7 is never going to be useful even with postmarketOS, because it simply runs poorly with any reasonably modern software stack, not just more modern Android.

I’m not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it’s not a conspiracy. Even if vendors were forced to support devices for longer, I super sincerely doubt we’d see people running around with 7 year old phones. In 7 more years? Absolutely. Just like you now see people running around with 7 year old laptops today.

A real issue is probably just that Apple and Google and other flagship phone vendors continue to pump out a new phone every year even though it is clearly wasteful and pointless. Removing features just to bring them back sometimes is a truly pointless and stupid rigmarole when we could surely just wait 3 more years so that improvements can be made that aren’t pointless tradeoffs. But that is a different story, and arguably is a lot more than just an issue for the computer industry...

I agree with most of what you said but ...

> My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!).

why not Android 11? The Nexus is from Google as well as Android. So at some point they must have pushed some "useless" new features into Android that makes it incompatible with the older hardware. I say "useless" because besides gaming or probably video telephony there's nothing we do today with our phones that couldn't be done with those older devices so I don't see a reason why they shouldn't be able to run the newest Android.

> but it’s not a conspiracy

conspiracy is probably not the right term but I also don't think it's just a matter of circumstances. In the end they want us to buy new hardware every few years so I claim that the situation is brought to us intentionally.

SoC BSP support is your answer. It’s not a conspiracy.

Dollars to support vs user base size / revenue / contractual obligations. The devices were cheap in the first place specifically because there wasn’t going to be a 20 year BSP support contract.

I believe some Nexus 7 ROMs have been made with newer Android releases, but it is indeed pointless. It runs like shit even on the stock ROM anymore.

Modern operating systems are built to take advantage of modern hardware; in my opinion, there is nothing immoral about software being less efficient. A lot of things can lead to less “efficient” software, including better security measures, graphical effects, support for more advanced software and hardware that simply requires greater complexity, ... I have trouble believing that software vendors are sabotaging their performance on purpose. I’d be more inclined to question the intent of silently throttling older phones to improve battery life, which is much closer to an identifiable way that older phone hardware gets slower. But there are so many demands being placed on phones. Lowering audio, input and graphical latency across the stack necessarily costs some throughput. Newer, more complex web browsers running bigger websites necessarily requires more CPU and RAM. These are self-evident truisms IMO.

On the other hand, there’s just so many features that can drive new phones other than the obsolescence of old phones. Enthusiasts might want Wifi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, 5G—all features that can’t realistically be upgraded on existing hardware. Every day users might upgrade because their old phone has a cracked screen that costs more than the phone to fix, or perhaps their contract is up and the carrier or provider is offering essentially a free upgrade; because yeah, carriers certainly play into this role too, not only vendors of hardware and software. Some users might upgrade for features like eSIM, better battery life, wider coverage of international frequency bands, wireless charging...

Something like postmarketOS is still good, but I really feel like these approaches will really start to shine in the coming few years. I believe it is the phones and tablets coming out today that are likely to remain relevant for a long period of time, personally.

Absence evidence that, say, AOSP is being made intentionally slower, I have to sit on the side of doubt.

I have a phone I bought around 2015. It has Android 4.4 and the vendor provided only minor bug fixes for a very short time since then. I think it is quite typical for Android phones. HW is still OK but more and more apps drop support for such old OS.

The note is primarily there to let people know whether or not they can update to the latest version. K-9 Mail 5.600 supported Android 4.0.3 and newer.

And also no longer in support

https://endoflife.date/android

I have 5 android devices at home, 3 of them are android 4.4, not planning to upgrade until hardware fails. One LG phone doesn't even get updates for google play

K-9 Mail makes the very crippled Replicant on ancient hardware still be much better at accessing my email than my current iPhone is.

https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GalaxyS...

You're not hooking that up to a cellular network, are you?

Just WiFi; I didn't try cellular (and dislike what I understand of the cellular integration in the hardware).

Unfortunately, the onboard WiFi in the i9300 needed some closed device firmware blob, which I cannibalized from an old version of Cyanogen or Lineage. I've heard some people use a more Linux-friendly WiFi chipset with the i9300, via the OTG port, but that'd put it to the point of non-viable to me. So, as an stopgap measure open source handheld, I have an impure and not-much-trusted device that can do email, chat, SSH, and other non-Web network stuff pretty well anywhere I have WiFi.

> You’re welcome and sorry.

I realize this was tongue-in-cheek, so should probably be "You’re welcome and we're sorry."

Thanks.

https://github.com/k9mail/k9mail.github.io/commit/fc497cd565...

A few years ago I had trouble with K9 going into "sync disabled mode", for lack of a better term. Push notifications simply didn't work no matter what I tried and I missed lots of emails as a result.

Switched to FairEmail[0] and have been a happy user since.

[0] https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail

That's when Android started to kill background apps very aggressively, more or less requiring the use of Google's own Firebase service if you wanted to get realtime push notifications.

It was a monumentally stupid "feature". Even Samsung's default email app on my Samsung flagship phone only detects new emails every 20 minutes or so, which suggests that top-tier OEMs also have trouble getting past the ruthless background app killer.

I'm glad that at least a couple of FOSS apps have found a way around this problem. I'm curious how FairEmail (and now K9, too) pulled it off. Is there an official "do not kill" flag now, or are they just using some sort of loophole that allows IMAP IDLE connections to be kept alive in the background?

Most apps use a foreground service. Using that the app is treated like an app running in the foreground and not like an app running in the background.

https://developer.android.com/guide/components/foreground-se...

Foreground services require a persistent notification, which looks more like a nasty hack than a proper workaround.

As far as I know the app can just ask to run in the background and then it works. Problem is many apps don't use the native dialog box to request it, and instead ask the user to go to settings and do it manually.

https://dontkillmyapp.com/

> Various improvements and bug fixes related to end-to-end encryption (Autocrypt, OpenPGP).

Great to see that Autocrypt is still a priority. It's just a pity that Thunderbird isn't as enthusiastic about it:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

K-9 Mail doesn't send format=flowed

https://forum.k9mail.app/t/k-9-mail-is-not-sending-format-fl...

Whenever I see a limitation on plain-text (and monospace fonts), I tend to avoid that client. K-9 is not one of them. Plain-text works OK with LKML and patches are very readable.

This issue is about sending a plain-text email.

https://useplaintext.email/#etiquette

Seems the bug will be prioritized?

https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/3868

That's a different issue.

Funny, I've been using it for years and never knew it was gone :coldsweat:

Dev work stalled for quite some time as (I believe) a lot of work needed to be done to update the App for newer versions of Android.

Neither did I.

I've been using K9 email on my android phone for ages, and it just works.

Anyway, there's an app update today, a major one. There have been recent updates, but only minor ones.

Wait... where did it go, I've still got it on my phone and it's the only mail client I use.

confused face

The release of the latest stable version of K-9 Mail (5.600) was in September 2018, nearly three years ago. It "died" (but didn't really)

More info: https://k9mail.app/2020/06/01/Whats-Up-With-K-9-Mail.html

My favorite mobile email client of all time was ProfiMail[1] on my Symbian OS based Nokia 6682[2] way back in the day.

[1] https://www.lonelycatgames.com/apps/profimail

[2] https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Nokia-6682_id1108

Just blogged about it (https://b.jlel.se/s/49e) after musing about the Holo design in 2018 (https://b.jlel.se/s/9a).

Great work! Just set up a Liberapay donation.

Nice. I have been following the betas so this update isn't really much different for me.

I didn't see the update in F-Droid. I had been manually installing the apk and had to do the same for 5.800.

I especially appreciate that it works on my Android 6 device. My MotoX from 2013 is still my primary phone and it has no newer updates (running LineageOS).

I've been using K-9 Mail for years, I love it, great work! If you can spare the time, can you please add a simpler way to donate? I really don't want to create yet another account (liberapay?), please just let me pay with paypal directly.

If you have a GitHub account then you can use that to donate: https://github.com/sponsors/cketti

But I can really recommend creating a Liberapay acccount (it accepts PayPal) as many FOSS projects use it to receive donations and Liberapay is open source itself and run by a non-profit. Let's get K-9 to its goal of $1000: https://liberapay.com/k9mail

I used K-9 on Android (phone and tablet) and after switching to iOS (iPhone and iPad) it‘s the only App I miss.

I would pay 10€ for an iOS version.

Sadly, there are 0 (ZERO) iOS e-mail clients that support monospace font rendering. (Having plain-text is not enough for LKML). It would really be a game changer if there was a K-9 port for iOS (or iPadOS).

How long before the update hits the Google Playstore ?

Bonus point: if I install k9 through f-droid or the APK, will it keep my settings ?

For the latter question, only if they have the same signing key, otherwise Android considers them separate apps, AFAIK

We're doing a staged rollout. Current status available here: https://forum.k9mail.app/t/k-9-mail-is-back-5-800-release/11...

Switching between the F-Droid version and the official APK (Google Play version) is not possible. You'll have to uninstall the old version first (and that will remove all settings). However, K-9 Mail supports settings import/export.

Thanks for the detailed explanations ^^.

The status page says "Google Play: should now be available to 100% of users" and, true to that, I got the update!

First impressions: looks good!

Many thanks for all your work!

I've been afraid that I was going to loose K-9 (due to it becoming incompatible with a newer android or something). Thanks!

One note, If I opt out of giving the app contacts permissions I get nagged about it each time opening the app and composing a new mail etc. etc.

See https://forum.k9mail.app/t/cant-deny-contacts-permission-wit...

Thanks, as the nag-screen happened before the request I assumed androids do-not-ask-again wouldn't matter for the nag-screen. But it did! Thanks

does it support Exchange?

what benefits it has over Aqua mail feature wise (besides being open source)?

Google Gmail authentications broke K-9 mail usage with Gmail accounts a couple of years back.

Has that been addressed?

(Why I still have gmail accounts is a separate issue. Working on that.)

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229#zippy=%2Ci-ca...

Thanks.

You can use app passwords to add a Gmail account with 2fa enabled to K-9, works flawlessly for me.

Y'know, I actually knew that too, set up a MacOS Mail.app profile with that for a friend.

Thanks to you and others.

It's a pity it seems not to have incorporated the xoauth2 implementation contributed at one time. I had to move to fareemail just for that.

In a previous work, an adjacent team used the K9 mail source code to implement a secure mail client. The consensus among the team was that the source code was terrible in many ways. On iOS, we had written our own mail client, but on Android, for various reasons, it was decided to use an open source instead of implementing our own. Not sure what amount of research was invested in investing alternatives, but for years the team complained about the quality of K9. This was 6-8 years ago.

If the team complained about their code base for _years_, I'd say the quality of the code base they started out with wasn't the only problem. Especially considering that you had the resources to write an email app from scratch.

While it's true that parts of K-9 Mail's code base are gruesome (even today), I can't remember any significant contributions from teams that have built products based on K-9 Mail.

Agreed. The entire Android side of the product was not managed well from the start. The product started as iOS only, because top management had iOS devices. Suddenly they had the shocking realization that Android is very strong in Asia and Europe, and tasked a different team with creating a quick Android POC. That team chose the K9 codebase. The POC team then handed whatever they did to a new dedicated Android team which did all the complaining. They were a small team, but still. My team wasn’t really larger, and we did build a mail, contacts and calendar client. I guess management just couldn’t agree on the commitment.

Wonderful news! Hands down the best app for email on phones (a terrible, terrible concept made serviceable with K9).

I've only ever used FairEmail, can anyone who has tried both (and not rage quit either) give a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of both?

Also, can K9 do a "disable work emails outside of work hours" kind of thing? FairEmail (as far as I can tell) doesn't have this, and it gets a tad annoying to get emails at 9pm when my colleagues at the other side of the world.

The biggest difference is that the fairEmail interface felt more in place compared with modern apps. I imagine with updates that will change.

> Also, can K9 do a "disable work emails outside of work hours" kind of thing?

K-9 Mail has a "quiet time" feature that will not create notifications during the quiet period. It applies to all accounts, though.

I have used both and prefer FairEmail. Do note though that while FairEmail is free (and free) software, what makes it really great are it's paid pro features.

Does it solve the crash I often experience when deleting messages from large IMAP folders?

Too late... Switched to FairEmail some time after learning about broken push in K9.

Same here, not looking back.

I remember using it under Symbian OS at my Nokia phone.

What happened to it, for it to come back?

"The release of the latest stable version of K-9 Mail (5.600) was in September 2018"

https://k9mail.app/2020/06/01/Whats-Up-With-K-9-Mail

Thanks

I moved into Nine a while back - it's great, and in fact the only Android app I've ever paid money for!

It works well with my self-hosted email accounts, and before I went full time on my own business, it worked well with O365 and Exchange too - and it didn't force Exchange PIN-lock policies on me.

It also seems to allow customisation of just about everything, from view density to font sizes.

Highly recommended it.

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