K-9 Mail is poised to be Thunderbird for Android | Hacker News Reader

K-9 Mail is poised to be Thunderbird for Android

blog.thunderbird.net

47 pointsAbuAssar31 comments

For me, this is the news: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on...

In summary:

> Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android

What in the hell is going on? I use Thunderbird on desktop, and I hate it. It takes over 1 second to delete an email from my inbox, and has a dozen other things wrong with it.

I use K-9 mail on Android, and I like it. It serves my needs well enough.

The idea that K-9 is "transforming into Thunderbird" sounds utterly ridiculous to me.

How about, make Thunderbird on desktop transform into K-9 mail instead.

It's just a name. The real question is if there would be any change in management structure or who works on it. If not, I'm not gonna worry about it.

Hold on there friend. I use Thunderbird on desktop and have used it for nearly two decades across Windows, Mac, and Linux. I love it! It's extensible, has excellent plugins that Outlook will never have, and I can synchronize my settings across computers and it Just Works. Also using Outlook on my work machine takes a second to delete emails and it does all sort of weird behaviors like deleting emails when I accept a calendar invitation.

I've used K-9 on Android and while I liked it, I choose to not receive email on my phone. I do recommend it to non-technical family and friends, and it "Just Works" for them.

The idea that K-9 is "transforming into Thunderbird" sounds utterly fine and dandy to me.

How about we count our blessings and celebrate that FOSS software continues to give us options. Remember how the future of the project was looking uncertain a few years ago? Free Software is a community effort, consider contributing to the effort [0]!

[0]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/

You make a fine point but the person you are responding does contribute to the effort.

I personnally disliked Thunderbird as I found the UI to be quite clunky but it seems that it's headed in a good direction since a few years and it's already looking much better now.

On the other hand something that should be as easy as finding a email... do I have to search into each account ? Not great. Maybe there's a way but if it's not obvious to me the computer guy, it's not going to be obvious to the casual user.

You should demand a refund. Or, archive mail by year so the underlying SQLite database file is smaller and make sure it's not your mail provider that's slow.

Yes, second to the archiving mail by year advice.

Also switching over to maildirs (which is a one-time inconvenience) means that you can share the same maildir with mu et al. Sharing your maildir is definitely not supported though! :)

You mean a steady income stream for the developer is less important for you than the name and icon of the app?

I wish Thunderbird would transform into K9 on Lin/Win/Mac.

/ducks

https://email.faircode.eu/ is superior in all aspects. By far, the best android email client.

Agreed. In addition to its incredible reliability and capacity for customization, you can justifiably pretend that its name is actually Fairymail.

I agree, I was using K9 until FairMail came out. It has all the features from K-9, it is open source and from very reliable developer which I trust more than Mozilla with its fishy additions to firefox (author of NetGuard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard ) which is the first software I install on any new phone. Firefox is the second, FairMail is the third).

I can only wish all the software would be of this quality, congrats M66B.

I stuck with K9 because Fairmail has a cluttered UI. Yes, it's very fully featured, and I have nothing but respect for Marcel and it's a great option, but K9 is slightly easier to get started with for me.

Fairmail is simply the best way to use email on android. K9 comes in second definitely

It's a one man job but you can feel he has put a lot of work and thought into it. The app has a lot of options but also a wizard that makes the set up easy.

I bought the premium version to support the developement. Support is over... email of course. He was very helpful when I asked about an issue I had with the app.

This sounds amazing. Is there something for the desktop? Maybe some self hosted client?

It's really weird that the only option seems to be thunderbird

And TIL that K-9 Mail is actually owned by the Mozilla Foundation.

I had to look up the history of this and found the following: "On 13 June 2022, it was announced that K-9 Mail had been taken over by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation with current maintainer Christian Ketterer joining the team, and plans for K-9 Mail to be rebranded as Thunderbird for Android following the completion of a feature roadmap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-9_Mail

Good for them I guess? Mozilla does have deep pockets, I do hope they use it to improve K-9 Mail for everyone.

It's all funded by donors these days. A small portion of Thunderbird users pay a small sum per month, and it adds up to real money.

As long as it keeps working and doing gpg, call it whatever ya want.

The real MUA issue is that for some reasons they are stuck in a deep past. The sole modern MUA we have are not for generic users, like notmuch (-emacs or some other frontend) and mu. We need something offering:

- searching like notmuch/mu, meaning offering a local auto-download of all messages or all messages under specific folders, complete trees;

- being tag-based or at least offering tags and rules to apply them automatically

- offering filtering like MailDrop

- offering piping messages to external tools (like automatic grab attachments and archive them appropriately)

This IS NOT HARD but is made hard due to the actual state of things, against users posses and power to makes anything a service. Thunderbird is not good at all in that sense, it's just another '90s-style MUA as K-9.

Is support for JMAP on the radar yet?

https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/milestone...

On the radar yes, but very low.

That's the biggest point for me, native label support for thunderbird, thunderbird mobile/k9 and fairemail. I must admit I don't care about jmap and if label support is implemented with a jmap extension this would fine too.

Fastmail is very active in ietf standards. I like Bron even if I don't always agree, and I think the energy behind JMAP is interesting. TLS protected exchanges baked in, and a passable structure beyond 822.. what's not to love.

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words. I'm very agreeable; mostly. And quite likeable!

Also keen to see JMAP more widely out there of course, we're plugging away at getting Calendar and Contacts into JMAP over at IETF now. Slowly becoming the full service protocol we've always dreamed of being.

K-9 was pretty nice at the time I was looking… but aquamail was the best android email client for a while.

Not open source but the developer was quite responsive.

Is thunderbird really a brand name you want to take over? Maybe Thunderbird desktop should become K9 mail desktop.

Thunderbird has WAY more brand recognition than "K-9 Mail". And at least the current Thunderbird maintainers care more about their product than Mozilla cares about Firefox.

this K-9 and fair can I install it on my desktop win11pro ty

K-9 Mail is great. Coming from iOS to a google-less android, I'd be lost without it.

The decision to keep both names is strange though. If its just a name and colour theme, what is the point? Thunderbird already has far more brand recognition, so it makes sense to just switch.

It's funded by donations, so what matters in such questions is name recognition by the donors.

I've used K-9 for over a decade, and it's the best email client I've ever used, mobile or desktop. I personally have much more fondness for the K-9 brand than the Thunderbird brand, so I appreciate the decision to keep the K-9 branding around, even though I know there's no practical difference.

It seems keeping both names reflects the high degree of opinionated fans in the open source community (for both apps, apparently).

They seem to be taking from the playbook of a merger sharing two names for a transition period to call attrition risk…

I share the view in support of Thunderbird as the future (although I’m an iOS user still so awaiting over here), but was surprised to see some many comments in support of the opposite.

Especially given Thunderbird has been signaling this path for over a year.

And re: your migration to a Google-less mobile experience, I’m right there with you.

It’s still surprisingly difficult to get great email client developers to support basic IMAP/CalDEV/CardDEV functionality (e.g., Superhuman, Missive). It’s the only thing keep me from migrating all accounts to a great host like Fastmail.

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