What features of K9 do you like/dislike, especially compared to the GMail app?
What features of K9 do you like/dislike, especially compared to the GMail app?
I mainly like that it's FOSS and on F-Droid (no google services for me). I haven't used Gmail in years, but IIRC, no annoying smart replies or features I don't use like gdrive, photos, hangouts... denser UI, reliable notifications, unified inbox, good multi-account support, support for gpg. It generally gets out of the way. My mother asked me to reinstall it after she changed phones.
I could use better support for nested IMAP folders, better search and syncing of said folders. Probably a better config workflows for non techies? Though that's pretty good already.
I would really like it to be easier to customize the sender mail address, as I make extensive use of +aliases, and would have to create a new identity each time.
Both accounts, once setup, just behave.
On the groupware front, I use DavX5 and ICSx5 to do to calendar and todo sync to fastmail, and Tasks.org [2] to do the front end for the todos.
For my work accounts, I use the nine email app which lets me authenticate to exchange active sync without needing a work profile on my phone so I can see emails, calendar, todos etc.
[1] purelymail.com
The old UI is very good at this worflow and that's why I ended up using K9. The new UI with the unified inbox is bad at it. This K9/Thunderbird? I should download it to understand how it works. Probably like the new UI but who knows.
Feature-wise, nothing really caught my attention compared to Gmail. At the time that I switched, however, K9 Mail was noticeably snappier for me, had no Google Play Services dependency, and weighed about 7MB to Gmail's 50MB (at the time).
Migadu has been perfect for my needs. The basic plan at $20/m is more than enough and it's basically dirt cheap. If you're a student you can even get it for half the price. I really like their lax and understanding limit policy.
Instead of paying per "user"/"email address"/etc you pay for usage (sent/received/storage). With this you can add as many domains/email addresses/users that you want. If you have 20 domain names where you just need need 1 mailbox it costs the same as 1 domain name with 20 mailboxes since it all comes down to usage.
If I wasn't so deep into google workspace (or whatever they are calling it this month, G-suite/g-apps/google apps for your domain) and if I had it to do over again I would use this in a heartbeat, I still might but it will be harder to move (need to figure out how to keep docs/drive/calendar stuff on google or migrate it to other services).
Fastmail was the fallback provider I always considered moving to but at $3-$5/user it's a pain to add old/low-volume accounts that still need to be monitored but aren't seeing a ton of use. Migadu solves that problem very nicely and would probably lead to me spinning up new "mailboxes" much faster/sooner because I imagine it's pretty easy to do and then only need to think about upgrading as your usage increases, not just your mailbox count.
I couldn't find a good answer to "does spam count towards your receiving limits", I found a reddit post [0] that says it doesn't and that the limits are soft anyway (which I had already seen) so I'm assuming this is the case or it doesn't really matter in the long run.
Lastly I wish they would offer 2FA though I understand their current reasoning (still need no-2FA/app-specific-passwords for IMAP so does 2FA really matter?). I get what they are saying but it feels like they could implement 2FA for managing/overseeing your account and then have app-specific passwords for each mailbox (maybe 1 main with the ability to create others so you could disable it if you decide to stop using a client/service that you attach to your email)? I could be missing something as I've not actually signed up and tried the service, yet.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Migadu/comments/jqej2i/do_notificat...
My own fully self hosted dns, postfix SMTP and dovecot IMAP over TLS setup. Not something to attempt casually unless you work in network engineering for an ISP and have the motivation to maintain your own MX and email hosting environment for other reasons.
I am willing to tolerate this issue because I don't search all that often. In general, a buggy FOSS app is better to me than a commercial app because it is unstable at any given time but relatively stable over time, whereas commercial apps tend to be stable at any given time but unstable over time.
I generally like it more than FairMail (simpler, fewer options that I seemed to need to set). But I have tried to sell it to other Android users, and not having swipe-delete made all of them give up. I'm fine without it, but would probably adapt to it if it was Thunderbird standard; I use the iOS email app a lot too.
I'm MXRoute/fastmail/gmail/exchange on the back end for MX service providers.
I mainly like that it's no-BS, just works, is available on F-Droid, small download, dark theme, import/export for accounts and settings, lots of switches to flip in the settings should I find any of them necessary to use. I expect none of this to change with the Thunderbird rebrand so it's a win for both projects _and_ the users as far as I can see.
The only feature it's missing which hurts is nested folders. All nested folders are displayed in a list structure, rather than a tree, which is a bit of a pain if you use a nested archive (think Thunderbird's Monthly Archive structure).
Light-weight. Does not add accounts to Android system. Less colours.