Thunderbird for Android Now Available
blog.thunderbird.net
blog.thunderbird.net
"Quite a few people seem to love K-9 Mail and have asked us to keep the robot dog around. We believe it should be relatively little effort to build two apps from one code base. The apps would be virtually identical and only differ in app name, app icon, and the color scheme. So our current plan is to keep K-9 Mail around."
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/12/when-will-thunderbird-f...
I guess if you have a CI pipeline it's easy to copy/paste or add a Matrix job, but it seems like an odd choice.
I'm using and loving Thunderbird for Android.
It's also one of the oldest request on the github https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/63...
(There's a bunch of comments that are just wrong, the code does 'understand' the separators, it just doesn't do much with that knowledge).
The UI last time I used it used a mixture of web-views and standard components.
We were at the time handling the Material UI transition to make it look like a modern app.
Until that was done there was very little incentive to invest a lot of time in a UI that would be scrapped when that happened.
Other big projects (like the Android timers change which broke reliable email fetch or battery life) were also prioritised ahead of it (for reasonable reasons).
Honestly with only cketti and another person working on it part-time, the project struggled to do more than (or even) keep pace with the Android ecosystem. Maybe now it can. But the release cadence and approach was painfully slow.
I stopped my involvement with the project when I switched from Android to Apple - my motivation was always improving my own email experience.
I hope joining Thunderbird is going to pay dividends for big task like this one.
It is very snappy (unlike how I remember desktop Thunderbird all those years ago), and seems to work well so far, though it's a little bare-bones feature-wise. One thing that is unfortunate is it doesn't appear to be able to recognize Fastmail's "pinned" messages and map them to "starred" messages. That alone will keep Fastmail's own app on my phone.
Fastmail also has different actions for marking as spam and reporting phishing; I'm not sure how effective the latter is, but of course Thunderbird doesn't support it, as presumably that's a Fastmail-proprietary thing.
I'll probably keep it and see if it can serve as my daily driver, with the Fastmail app as a fallback for pinned messages for now.
I don't think there's anything proprietary going on, so I did a quick search. Fastmail supports JMAP [0], and JMAP [1] supports setting special keywords [2] for a message to mark it as spam of phishing. It may be possible to get this to work.
[0] https://www.fastmail.com/dev/
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8621.html
[2] https://www.iana.org/assignments/imap-jmap-keywords/imap-jma...
I also find it surprisingly user friendly, the UI is easy to navigate and the advanced stuff is pretty well communicated e.g. templates and mailbox rules.
Will keep checking back in over time.
Also, I am just curious if you're unhappy with their android app? I find it very full featured
But no, it's a formal android app and I offer two pieces of supporting evidence: the resource browser shows the apk very obviously has a bazillion android resource files <https://imgur.com/a/pUbQ8Bp> and it supports native fingerprint auth
Native fingerprint auth can be implemented on top of a webapp; that isn't evidence either way.
Either way, no offline access in an email app... pretty bad.
Push support has been there for a long time now. You can enable it on a per-folder basis, check in Manage folders.
Usually you rely on a server telling the mobile app that there's something new to poll (or the message is directly sent and displayed).
Content advisory: longish rant ahead.
I have 4 email accounts: 2 Gmail, 1 Outlook, and 1 ProtonMail. I also use Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. The reason I switched to Thunderbird was to manage them all in one uniform UI instead of keeping 6 open tabs.
I tried hard to love it, but after about 6 months, I am ready to give up. The main annoyance is that I cannot see sent and received messages in a single thread. I know this feature is coming soon, but I do not know how long to wait.
The second problem is that Thunderbird’s search, frankly, sucks. For example, while focused on a folder, if I start a search, it doesn't automatically narrow it to that folder; it searches across all my mail. I've noticed that when I need to find something, I open the Gmail web interface.
Finally, there are bugs. Most of them are relatively minor, but combined, they ruin my user experience. There are strange calendar event reminders that will not go away, bugs when event modifications do not sync to the server, and the most bizarre bug: when I reply to my own message, it sets the FROM field to one of the recipients, making it look like I’m faking someone’s email. Sometimes, when I reply to an HTML-heavy message, the editor in my reply starts in white font on a white background, so I cannot see what I’m typing until I change it. Etc.
I do not want to belittle the hard work all the developers put into Thunderbird. It’s a very complex piece of open-source software that does many good things. It just seems to fall a little short.
So, I am seriously contemplating giving up and going back to the web interfaces for my respective email accounts.
2) Expression Search NG might solve your search issues: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/expre...
There’s a major internal message storage rework project happening in Thunderbird, which should fix this once completed. You can try it in some beta builds, but of course, it’s still beta and isn’t compatible with some plugins yet. Most notably, the TBSync plugin, which provides Microsoft Outlook integration, doesn’t support it at this stage.
It defaults to the bizarre Gnome look (no native controls, toolbar buttons haphazardly strewn through the title bar), but you can change it in the preferences if you hate that as much as I do.
I have a relatively niche use case where thunderbird would no longer find my smime certificate on my smart card. But only in the compose/send UI, not in settings.
While I understand not many people are doing this, it also... Used to work, and I would have thought that detecting regressions in X.509 cert validation should be well covered by tests.
In comparison, evolution works.
My only note with that is the caldav and exchanges internal handling of event invites will fight with each other, so don't try to accept invites from within your imap mail client.
Maybe I'm missing what you're trying to do, but doesn't Ctrl-Shift-k "search" (called filter) on a per-folder basis? Testing for myself, I can filter by the basics, including body, and have it filter on a my focused folder
You can donate to Thunderbird in general. Right on the homepage of Thunderbird mobile [1], is a donation link. [2] Unlike donations on mozilla.org, where the funds go to Mozilla Foundation (and not to Mozilla Corporation, which is the one developing Firefox), the donations on thunderbird.net go to funding Thunderbird on all the platforms that the Thunderbird team works on.
They still have two different apps, Thunderbird Mobile and K-9, but the only difference is the branding. All of the UI tweaks other than the icons and colours are in both apps. The functionality is identical. So other than not deleting K-9 it is a rename (I guess it is a hard link, not a rename).
Such as...?
K-9 also has it's faults, but it's been a pretty good ophone mail reader.
Thunderbird, under the ever declining mozilla foundation's wing, continues to make nonsensical changes while still failing to fetch mail into all IMAP folders (among a number of other fundamental functional failures).
Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions in trying to create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.
Gives open source projects funding and development, Mozilla gets new avenues for subscription money to try and be more independent, and MS/Google's market shares can be chipped away at. Win win win. Potential anti-trust bait when Google start crying and withdrawing funding, too.
If a major website starting blocking user agents for any reason other than compatibility then all that would do is trigger (finally) the deprecation of user agents strings as browsers would all just pretend to be each other.
But none of that means that the war somehow can't or won't occur.
Firefox uses Gecko instead of Webkit. They can't change their user agent string.
Even if they whitelisted Safari, that would still be actionable.
They're not being forced to provide a service for free, they're not being allowed to ostracize essentially the only browser with any meaningful percentage of users that doesn't use their web engine as that is an anti-competitive and monopolistic practice.
It's difficult for me to envision how that's rigorously enforceable to prevent something outside of the app (like a browser) to access something ultimately consumed by an API without resorting to (expensive and crackable) digital rights management at the hardware level. You can run down whatever train of thought you want, but ultimately since the client is running on machines controlled by the consumer, it can be cracked, reverse engineered, decapped, or whatever. This has been the end state for every attempt the industry has made to control user behavior. DVD CSS, Bluray, Sony's CD rootkit nonsense, every game console, satellite TV cards, analog cable TV, on and on, all broken.
I'm confident google/youtube wishes there weren't applications like FreeTube and yt-dlp. The fact of the matter is it's practically impossible to exclude them but still keep their own ecosystem functioning at an acceptable cost and with consumer buy in.
How does this support their mission or make them money? They are rich, but also wasteful with their spendings. So anything has to show value for their Mission. And they are having enough projects of their own, just none which are really working well.
> Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
uBlock works fine on its own. It's probably better for them to be independent.
> The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions
Nextcloud and Mattermost have both their own company. Do expect Mozilla to buy them out? Or should they just offer a hosted version with their own branding? What would be the value here?
> create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.
Mozilla has no real income outside of Google paying for a position in their Browser. And the money they have is far too low to compete with those behemoths in that space.
Also, I personally don't have any issue with Mozilla but a lot of people seem to hate them. I can only imagine all the internet drama that would ensue if they started acquiring projects like LibreOffice and Nextcloud.
I'm guessing there are legal risk issues with this. While ad blocking flies under the radar as a mom/pop operation with guerilla marketing the offended parties turn a blind eye. Make it a feature of a "corporate" product, and they'll sue.
Merely listing ublock origin as a "recommended extension" led to them being fined in China about two years ago. You can't even install it in mainland China right now.
FOSS on mobile is a basket case anyway (the dark side is too strong here) but the decades-long linux desktop story is not too hopeful either.
Things like deep interoperability, look-and-feel, UI conventions etc could go a long way towards making all those important applications feel like a coherent thing rather than a random patchwork stitched together with tape.
Is this a bug or do I have some misunderstanding about IMAP and a misconfiguration?
K-9 deletes as expected.
This is fine, but frankly we'd love to see resources toward returning Thunderbird to be the more open thing it once was.
Losing the robust plugin system was incredibly frustrating; like, all I want is the ability to have custom colored accounts back.