Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanleesipes | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.

The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.

View on HN

This is great. I am glad K9 will live on. I didn't think it wouldn't anyway because frankly K9 is established software and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything in that space. It wouldn't make sense to kill it and redo it. This is not Microsoft after all, which would take the product and cripple it so much that it has one third the features and the Microsoft name.

However this particular deal sounds a lot like white labeling, don't you think ? :)

Hi Ryan, nice seeing you here. If you don't mind, would love to hear your thoughts:

I’m missing a story about mobile Linux. Has this been discussed; is this something on the roadmap?

There are already excellent e-mail options for iOS. Right now there is almost nothing outside of the cli that’s usable on mobile Linux. Thunderbird would have a chance of being the main choice while helping adoption of mobile Linux in the medium-to long-term.

I understand it’s not realistic to expect anything anytime soon, but I do hope this is being discussed and that we will see a strategy for it.

Have you tried Geary on mobile Linux? I haven't (no pinephone or similar), so I'm sincerely asking. It works well in a very narrow window on desktop Linux, so that seems hopeful? I wonder if it's excessively memory hungry or syncs mail inefficiently, though.

I've tried it a bit.

It's the most viable and promising so far I think. I have too many directories for it to be usable without some new features, though (namely highlight dirs with new mail and more filtering capabilities). It's practically unusable, but granted I may have an unusual setup. If you just have a handful of active folders it might be great.

Didn't notice any surprising syncing issues so far.

If anyone wants a free pinephone + will use it for something useful (and is prepared to pay the postage from Melbourne, Australia), then they're welcome to mine.

I bought one a few months ago to support the project but never ended up using it. It's still sitting in a drawer.

Realistically, there's no hope I'll ever do anything with it myself. ;)

Sounds great, if no takers yet! I’ve been meaning to do some PostMarketOS dev and it’s one of the primary supported devices. I’m at the other end of the world though, so if someone closer is interested that’d make more sense! Mail is in profile.

No-one else has stepped forward yet. Just emailed you so we can figure it out. :)

Why not keep the K-9 name though? Arguably it's a stronger brand for the target audience than Thunderbird.

If anyone is getting a sense of deja vu, it's because this is was Outlook mobile strategy. Microsoft acquired a popular third-party Exchange mail client for iOS/Android, named Acompli, and rebranded it to Outlook.

>We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components.

So sayeth every acquiring company about the acquired. I can think of very few that it held true. Maybe this can be added to the list, but only time will tell. I wouldn't suggest people holding their breath though

What basis is there for your accusations?

These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.

>What basis is there for your accusations?

History

>These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.

Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.

>> What basis is there for your accusations?

> History

That's all you have? They are baseless then.

Not really. It's more of a wait and see, "lets hope for the best, but plan for the worst" kind of scenario.

Yes, really! There is no basis. "History" isn't a basis - try it in another context.

Ugh no. History is indeed a good basis to observe and learn from.

Bearing in mind it's not a 100% successful predictor, but is useful for figuring out how things are _likely_ to play out.

Just take care that K-9 development doesn't get bogged down in well meant feature ports/unifications that end up being negative value for anyone who isn't fully committed to running their entire life through Thunderbird and K-9, in the most synchronized way. For example the not really in scope but also not really out of scope nature of calendar in Thunderbird should better not spread to K-9 I think (as someone who has never used K-9, but is on Thunderbird since Communicator 4). But if you succeed avoiding that pitfall, if it's really just "we would love to do something on mobile, but we would hate to steal attention from K-9", then it's certainly just applaudable lack of NIH, nice!

Thanks to both you and KMail team. This merger makes tons of sense as both clients made it through some dark years and have both come out on top with amazing improvements. I'm really excited to see what the combined team delivers!

So if it won't change, what is the point of this? I get that Thunderbird (Mozilla corp) wants a mobile client, but if its just the same horrible app with a rebrand, what does it actually offer (since desktop thunderbird is still pretty awful and recently has got to the point where gmail is preferable)?

> It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned

Nothing in this world is purely altruistic. If it didn't make business sense, this wouldn't be happening. Please surprise me and stay true to your word on this.

> The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.

We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way. Even if true, please understand why your words are perceived this way.

What business sense do you have in mind? Thunderbird is funded by donations and governed by volunteers. Even if this were some kind of money grab, who's grabbing what money?

> We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way.

You're reasoning is that the Internet made you do it, therefore it's true?

It was video games and rap music. I swear.

Isn't the business reason that they would rather acquire an existing mail app that is similar to what they had in mind rather than building a brand new one themselves?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com