People would be wise to look into the incredible amount of criticism thrown at K-9 in the last two years over the recent UI design changes.

I personally see this as a way for cketti to get acqui-hired and maybe get away from K-9 Mail. The amount of hate directed towards him from the userbase (mostly justified, sorry to say) has been substantial and I can't imagine he really wants to continue dealing with that.

Hopefully Thunderbird will do another UI redesign and fix the mess that was made. I ditched K-9 after the new design came out two years ago.