K-9 Mail 6.000 | Hacker News Reader

K-9 Mail 6.000

k9mail.app

187 pointstweetle_beetle81 comments

I first began to use K9 when gmail's android app stopped allowing me to send plaintext email. I still find this very confusing. I routinely write emails to a developer using an ereader, for whom plaintext emails are trivially easy to work with and for whom HTML emails are a world of pain.

That's what started my migration away from google.

Having said that, K9 is fine. It's good enough that I'm not looking for a replacement.

Not trying to get you to stay, but, did you try basic HTML gmail webapp?

I think the original complaint is about the Android app? Some might prefer to not bother with web apps and might want local/native ones instead.

Just pointing out that it might be a non-starter for some people.

Otherwise, that's a nice suggestion to get to the bottom of where things go wrong - be it specific to the local app or whether it also happens on the web app.

I haven't looked at that before. But for what it's worth, I confirm that if I navigate to the web app on my phone, navigate to the HTML version, and repeatedly click to ignore gmail's suggestions to use the mobile app, then it is in fact possible to send plaintext email from my phone.

I don't think this is a suitable replacement for an email app. For example, this is an extremely inconvenient way to check email, and having to use a different process to check and read email is too much friction. But this does seem like a workaround to send a plaintext email.

I have used K-9 Mail for years, but I'm very unhappy with the UI changes in version 5.6 and later.

It's not just they moved things around and I'm sore about that. Real usability has gone down. The app used to be very good with one hand, but the new design main menu is in the upper-left corner of the screen, which is just dumb. Visual clutter has been added to make things pretty.

I would have complained about notification, but it looks like they might be fixing some of those issues with this new patch.

Basically it seems like the new developer just wanted to pad his resume, so he picked up a project that was otherwise abandoned and started re-designing and re-implementing things so he could brag about it. The changes don't really fix any problem that anyone had, and improvements are none since the new releases are mostly about removing features and re-writing code.

I really need to start looking for a new mail app, because I have no hope in the future of K-9 Mail.

https://f-droid.org/de/packages/de.monocles.mail/

> that was otherwise abandoned

What are you talking about? It was never abandoned. That UI redesign took them multiple years and they released several betas over that time period. Just almost nobody bothered to chime in during any of the betas and then everyone started to complain when it got to stable.

https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/graphs/contributors

> I really need to start looking for a new mail app

Years ago I did this process by installing ~5 mail apps on my phone and using them all together and after a while deleting ones liked less til I was left with one. Ended up with 'Nine' and been using it ever since. Seemed to work well as a decision making method and have used for other app categories.

Common problem with open source UI/UX design. Either there is one guy with their own ideas or it's design by committee. Neither gives good results.

Even the best UI design without measurement is just 10% of job. Really good UI/UX goes trough UX laboratory testing with human subjects where they measure everything. How user feels about the UI is usually less important than how they use it and how quickly they get things done. Users get used to a good UI and they like what is familiar.

Fairemail is hands down the best email app I've ever used

> Basically it seems like the new developer just wanted to pad his resume, so he picked up a project that was otherwise abandoned and started re-designing and re-implementing things so he could brag about it. The changes don't really fix any problem that anyone had, and improvements are none since the new releases are mostly about removing features and re-writing code.

I rather be more generous and apply Hanlon’s Razor. The new dev probably does see it as an improvement because it follows some more popular UI trends.

I use K-9 on my Android phone and I'm happy with it.

It was recommended by FastMail (where I host my e-mail address) and it's been working properly since then.

Ha, so it's better than Fastmail's own Android client? I may well give it a go, then, as the Fastmail app (much as I love their service) is 'not great'.

I really like their Android and web clients. I don't use a lot of advanced features, but find it to be very responsive and handles everything I do very well. Prior to switching to Fastmail, I used to have my mail forwarded to Gmail but much prefer Fastmail's clients to Gmail now, which surprised me.

Same for me

I like Fastmail's app but I have different Fastmail for work and home. I don't want to connect them and I don't want to switch between them in one app. For now I have Fastmail for work and I use Apple Mail for home, but in the past I have used K9 Mail for this sort of situation.

I wonder why it's not permitted to have multiple instances of an application with different configurations.

It is possible, with a work profile, (though I'm not sure how one sets up their own profile without a corp-managed device): https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en

An app like Shelter: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

It's an alternative to Island, except it doesn't have analytics (Insular is a fork of Island w/o that, but Shelter is a newer and better app imo)

I don't use Android anymore but I used to do this with Shelter : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.typeblog.s...

> Ha, so it's better than Fastmail's own Android client?

(This a biased personal opinion not based on a real experience)

Judging from thr screenshots it is the same framework used by many Android apps (most notably for me by Nextcloud) and it is really sucks.

The current FastMail app is sadly dependent on gapps (AFAIR FireBase dependency) but othereise it is just an SPA in the guise of an Android app which works marvelous... till you have the connectivity.

If you need an offline access to your mail then the FastMail app isn't for you.

Hm I don't understand your point here. I do not know their Android app either but looked up the screenshots and this seems to be pretty similar to their iOS app, which is basically a small, highly functional and incredibly fast version of their website (which means you get all the features like creating aliases as well). Sadly, this means there is pretty much no offline capability. At least until now, but I know they're working on that.

It's exactly that.

I use K9 because Fastmail's client is closed source and not on f-droid (I don't have a google play account). It works ok for me as a secondary/occasional email client (main one is on laptop). It does miss notifications. I have heard somewhere that the only way to get reliable notifications involved using a google play service, which I didn't want to allow. I usually have mobile data on my phone disabled anyway, unless I am actually about to use it. But, I think other people use their phones a lot more than I do. I'm in front of a real computer almost all the time, so the phone is just in case I have to check something while away.

I think you can set it up to get pull notifications (like every 15 or 30 min), and then disable "battery optimisation" for the app (that is, set it to "no restriction"). In my experience (my wife's GrapheneOS phone) it doesn't drain that much battery anyway.

Fastmail "app" is just a webpage.

Fastmail has a native Android app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fastmail.a...

... that is just a webview.

Really curious in what world that can be considered native.

Oh I thought you were saying they only had a web app, and you didn't realize they had an actual app.

I use the Fastmail Android app and didn't realize it's just a webview.

Which is basically just a webview. Don't get me wrong - it's a good webview. But as a consequence there's no offline functionality at all - not even to view emails you've just opened a minute ago. Otherwise I think the Fastmail product is great.

K9 is as good as it gets if you need a multi email android client.

Not really. It doesn't support OAuth, which is kind of silly (well, actually very silly).

I switched to FairEmail, which has too many options but supports OAuth.

The OAuth support won me over to FairEmail (https://email.faircode.eu/) as well. Was a long time K9 user over several Android releases, but I guess I'm getting impatient in my old age. This last time had no end of trouble getting things to work and finally gave FairEmail a try. OAuth support for all my accounts won me over immediately. Now if Thunderbird would only make the same effort for the desktop...

I made the exact same move for the same reasons a few weeks ago. The UI is a little... dense, but plenty featureful and made working with required oauth for my school Outlook email pretty easy.

Thunderbird has supported Oauth2 since v38 - used it myself on several occasions for migrating gmail accounts in work context, works fine.

I use K9 mail with app specific passwords. Works just as well. Takes afew extra minutes to set up compared to OAuth

If you use a company account, you might not be able to have app specific passwords. OAuth is your only option then.

Is OAuth2 on their roadmap?

I think K9 was kind of in maintenance mode until recently. It's been nice to see more updates though.

Why do you need OAuth? I still use k9mail v5.6 and Gmail still works for me.

"but supports OAuth" should be qualified. Neither FairMail nor Thunderbird support custom oauth configurations. Both only come with preconfigured oauth setups for a small number of providers including gmail and outlook. It might actually be just these two. Perhaps one of them supports gmx or yahoo as well. That's it.

If you have your own SMTP/IMAP with oauth support you cannot use either tool to log into it. The only actual software that I know which supports custom oauth configuration is Roundcube webmail. It also happens to work beautifully with postfix + xoauth.

By the way, the last time I was searching for an email client with oauth support I got the distinct impression that oauth was on its way out anyway.

Is there an iOS port? Or comparable iOS app? (Not the official Mail app please)

I’m not sure but I’m using Outlook on iOS and it’s been better than the regular mail app in my opinion. No idea about security and privacy though, after all I’m introducing another developer into my mails which can’t be too good I guess.

Outlook goes through Microsoft servers

Ive been looking for a while as well, and most iOS email apps are basically cloud apps where the app dev's servers log into your email for you, which I dont like.

Im currently testing Canary, which doesnt seem to do that and so far its ok. But I K9 and Fairemail are definitely one of few apps Im missing since migrating to iOS.

I’m using p=p on iOS - I saw it flagged as a K9 equivalent somewhere so tried it, and so far it’s good and table for me - let’s me see a lot of mails without the “external content” which at times , mostly, is just great

Here is an interesting option: p=p email

https://www.pep.security/en/

For me it was freezing frequently when downloading emails, and became unusable over time. FairEmail was a bit better, but the UI is awful unfortunately. In the end I've ended up with the Google Mail app - not my first choice but it works well with multiple accounts and is easy to use.

To me Google Inbox was the best incarnation of an email client ever (both the mobile and web app). They have quite inexplicably pulled the plug on it though.

People tell me most of Inbox's features have been integrated into Gmail now. But it just isn't the same..

To me it was clear on the day when they pulled the plug and dumped everyone back into regular gmail: this was a product that was worked so well, that you no longer saw things that you were not going to interact with and were not wasting your time in this attention economy. And that was a “bees against honey” situation and it not allowed to continue.

People who created Inbox they should be proud of themselves!

Aqua mail

I use BlueMail myself. I would normally take the open source option, but K9 didn't work with so many servers. In desperation I went back to GMail, but it didn't handle rfc822 attachments. Then Microsoft Outlook, but it just didn't work period on many occasions. I tried a whole pile of others in rapid succession, which is how I came across BlueMail.

It works with every service, handles the broadest range of attachments, is perfectly reliable, has no ads and has the best UI of any of them. I don't know why it exists, but I'm glad it does.

Still, it not being open source hurts. I wish Thunderbird worked on Android.

This prompted me to open K.9 and just check, I was in undated with a week worth of missed email.

I like K.9 but the notifications are extremely unreliable and I don't want to have to get into the habit of checking for mail.

They're substantially improved in 6.000:

"Notifications

We ended up rewriting large parts of the code dealing with notifications. The user experience isn’t vastly different, but hopefully most of the annoying things that you had to put up with are gone now. Some examples:

When syncing a folder for the first time, the app no longer creates notifications. That’s a good thing. When setting up the app, you don’t want to get notifications for messages that are 2 years old but happen to be unread.

The app no longer creates notifications when you manually refresh the message list. However, you will still get notifications when manually refreshing a whole account or all accounts. This is so you don’t miss new messages in folders that aren’t currently displayed.

When displaying the message list screen, notifications for messages in that list are automatically removed. Previously, all notifications belonging to that account had been removed

In earlier versions, going back after opening a message via a notification would open the folder the message belongs to. Now the Unified Inbox is opened (if the message is part of the Unified Inbox).

Notifications for new messages are now restored when the app is restarted. That’s useful e.g. after a device reboot."

https://k9mail.app/2022/04/18/K-9-Mail-6.000

It would be amazing if the notifications really are "fixed". It's a fantastic app that has only been let down by the notifications. It happens, in my case to be linked to accounts I don't "check" regularly because they exist only for "important" emails. When I miss them, it can be a real issue for me.

Looks good! Congratulations to the team and the community.

I've always wanted to like K-9 Mail—it is _the_ open source email application for Android, similar to Thunderbird on desktop—but I'm always turned off by the antiquated user interface. FairEmail came on the scene a few years ago and displaced K-9 for many people. It has boatloads of features, is open source, and is fast, but I found the opinionated UI design choices hard to get used to. Eventually I found ways to tone the inbox down to a more traditional list, but I've never been happy, wishing we could have something more like the Gmail app for normal (non-Google!) IMAP/SMTP services.

Long story short: I'm going to try K-9 Mail again!

There was a big UI update last year or so. Been using it since then and liking it a lot.

Me too. I started using FairEmail recently when I finally decided to get a non-gmail email address, but I've been unhappy that it doesn't seem to understand that "junk" is my spam folder. Instead, it wants to handle the spam itself by blocking individual senders, which is pointless.

My desktop client seems to understand it.

And I just installed K9 and you can configure the spam folder, so I feel pretty good about it, too. I'm actually looking forward to the next spam that makes it to my inbox so I can see where it ends up.

I love K-9 Mail - it makes mobile email bearable !

Why is it only rated 2.9 on Play Store? The negative reviews look quite articulate, it doesn't seem like coordinated manipulation.

I would guess it's because there was a long time between updates while the material re-design was happening where it stagnated. Then when the re-design finally dropped many features still needed re-implimenting and many bugs needing squashing.

It's been a rough few years for the project because so much needed re-doing but they have come out the other end quite well

Because the redesign in 5.6 made it harder to use the app with multiple accounts and removed features people were actually using for the sake of redesign.

I'm still on 5.403 and I have no intentions on moving.

Wow. I thought K-9 was considered abandoned; this is great news! I'll have to investigate their support for caching/offline mail now. Fastmail's client doesn't do offline mail and it's a major pain in the butt.

This is the weirdest Android app on my phone. It does what I want, and works great 80% of the time. But then there's the 20% when it just... stops working, for weeks at a time. Error error error suddenly can't read my email. And when I try to update it, it crashes my whole phone during the update process. No other app does that.

On iOS I’ve been using and appreciating the clarity of what I first saw (most likely on this forum) as an iOS equivalent of K9 (I used that by preference on android) anyway - the app is tricky to type - p=p. But that =I actually 3 - - sorry I don’t know how to display that. Anyway, for iOS I love it as my K9 equivalent, I’m guessing they have an android app too??

K-9 Mail really is the grandfather of powerful E-mail apps, but I have switched to Spark a few years back when it became available for Android and never looked back. It's just a breeze to use. Sure, I have some gripes with it, but I really like the Google Inbox style of organizing my mail and keeping my inbox tidy.

Hey. I've been using k9 for quite some time now so I have a question here, how feature complete it is now against other email clients? I hear oath but other than that, is is 50% of the competition? More? Less?

K-9 Mail is the only thing I miss after my switch from Android to iOS.

Does it have Exchange already?

Also I remember it killed your battery and according new review on Play Store nothing changed about it in years.

Happy user of Aquamail (but Nine is decent as well)

Aquamail has been amazing for me for the last 6 years or so. Really solid, usable, packed with features and never had any problems.

Use it every day, fantasy app

I use K9 but can't find "mark as unread".

The envelope bhtton up top, next to the trash can.

Select the email from the folder list by pressing on it for a long time and then select the envelope with the dot on the top right.

Currently the only project i donate to. They are great.

Same for me, and literally the only app keeping me on Android

I love K-9 Mail!

I wish there was an IMAP client that would do something like hey.com.

Is that enough zeroes? 6.0000000000000000000000000 sounds better imho.

K-9 has been using 3 digits to the right of the decimal for over 12 years.

https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/tags?after=2.107

You could fork it and do just that

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