Goodbye K-9 Mail | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye K-9 Mail

cketti.de

248 pointstodsacerdoti37 comments

I got a chill of dread when reading the headline and the beginning of this, but it was nice to see that in the end the reason he chose to leave the project was precisely because he felt like it now had a stable future and it wasn't all relying on him. I've used K-9 Mail for many years and hope it remains usable for many more. Thanks for all your work. :-)

I stoped reading and went and checked for updates, which there was one, the changed the UI ,so that the one little frustration I had, is fixed:), and whew! eh, no need to change plans on email. Then finnished reading the post.

That could still happen.

I would watch their development closely considering to me, they'll likely leave K-9 Mail in the dust once Thunderbird on Android gets completely stable. It would be a sad end to one of the only true open source email apps left and with him gone, they can initiate it if they want to.

My earliest contributions to opensource is probably k9mail. I was still early in my undergrad, and wanted to get my feet wet in the opensource space, and to prep for google summer of code. K9 mail was my choice since the community (cketti) was friendly, and accommodating.

I started implementing the long-press events to handle image/attachment menu options. My PR wasn't upto snuff, but cketti was kind enough to clean it up and merge it. They even put my handle in the commit logs. Looking back, I probably wasted their time with my PR, but they were gracious enough to not complain, and gave me credit.

I still fondly remember those days and nights building upto the pr, and then refreshing the commit log page to see my handle show up.

I hope cketti finds happiness with whatever they do next.

I did't know what MZLA was exactly, Wikipedia says:

"The Mozilla Foundation supports and leads the Mozilla project, which develops Firefox, Thunderbird and [...] has two taxable subsidiaries: Mozilla Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation."

Mzla is the entity that houses the tb project. TB and ff are administratively separated and the two corps are the physical manifestation of this fact.

Hopefully this separation means Thunderbird will not require user email content to be licensed for AI, as Firefox now requires.

[citation needed]

See sibling comments. Mozilla issued a comment today without changing the new ToS (Feb 27), but one might inquire why a new ToS is necessary after years of providing "basic functionality" with the existing ToS:

> Mozilla’s since added an addendum to its announcement (12 hours after I published this article) to clarify its wording in the above excerpts. It says it needs a “…license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.“

Do you have any details on this? Sounds pretty concerning if true.

Probably a reference to the changes described in the post linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536. It's not clear to me that that's what it says, but it's also not clear to me that that's not what it allows.

Originally discussed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187423

How does this work with regard to the GDPR.

Good question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187423#43192516

That was an interesting history of the K-9 app. Personally I've always been a user of The Other FOSS Email App (FairEmail), but I keep a close eye on how Thunderbird for Android is developing and it's great to have (at least) two solid FOSS choices in this space. Kudos to this dev and hopefully the great work he has done is continued by the team there.

Why did there need to be a targeted release date for a re-branded open source project release, to the point that it stressed out the team?

* Was there very small runway for a number of salaries that were now needed?

* Were there enterprise sales contingent on a delivery date?

* Did they purchase a Superbowl ad?

* Were there suddenly managers, with OKRs and KPIs?

(BTW, I'm a happy K-9 user, on and off, for 15 years. With breaks for iPhones and other experiments, before coming back, and currently using K-9 on GrapheneOS. Kudos to the author and other K-9 contributors for their work.)

I was not involved in this project, but I have previously worked at Mozilla (although I left over 3 years ago). Maybe I can share some high level insights for how these things are approached.

Generally there are specific feature expectations when new platforms are added, and it can be a fairly major work. Besides rebranding, there are likely UI changes for look and feel, as well as specific capabilities expected across all platforms that were probably missing. Project deadlines tend to be soft deadlines rather than hard deadlines, but they are created to provide a point to work back from and define scope, and the goal is always to hit the deadline for release. Every day you don't release is a day users don't get access to the work you've put in.

I seriously doubt Mozilla purchased a Superbowl ad or otherwise had financial reasons to set this deadline.

Thanks, the general theory makes a lot of sense.

I don't want to disparage the great work that has gone into k9, but it's really unfortunately that the jmap support never went beyond the proof of concept state. I'd really love some mainstream client support for jmap.

Thanks cketti, for all your toil on K-9 and Thunderbird for Android. Over many years K-9 was the only mail client that just worked for me. When I finally transitioned to a certain secure web mail provider based in CH, I had to leave K-9 behind. But I still appreciate the challenge of making an open protocol mail client work reliably. Enjoy your sabbatical, however long it lasts, and keep an open mind about the future: the skills you've honed as a software developer are substantial and give you a head start in pretty much any field.

I loved the app and hated the icon with a passion. All the best. :)

It's a reference to Dr Who.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K9_(Doctor_Who)

Heavy user of k9. Thanks for your work!

"The months leading up to the release were quite stressful for me. All of us were working on many things at the same time to not let the targeted release date slip too much. We never worked overtime, though. And we got additional paid time off after the release "

I'm kind of curious what the source of the stress was. It clearly wasn't being overworked.

Sounds like there was a lot of context switching involved? I can see how that would be stressful.

Judging by their passion for the project, I imagine just the idea of releasing it was stressful.

Not working overtime (beyond, say, 8 hours a day), doesn't mean you're not getting swamped during the time (8 hours) that you are working.

Perhaps you only develop easy stuff. There were plenty of days when I was wrung out long before I had worked the regulation 7.5 hours.

I don't know the nature of their deadline, but when I've been working to meet a deadline that couldn't be moved for legitimate reasons, not being approved to work overtime made the stress worse not better. Something I made and cared about was going to ship broken because I couldn't fix the problems quickly enough. Weekends were spent trying not to think about everything I could be doing on the project right now.

Thank you kindly for the work with keeping K-9 light and efficient.

I wonder how this affects thunderbird?

Mozilla’s New Terms of Use:

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/02/26/mozillas-new-terms...

Both on the desktop, and in android.

I've had pretty severe misgivings about the mozilla foundation for years now, in spite of my multi-decade love-hate relationship with thunderbird. (it still has over 10 year old bugzilla entries for basic IMAP folder shortcomings)

Maybe when cketti gets over his downturn, and considers where to go next, the answer will be back to K-9 with a fork from pre mozilla.

The org being almost completely funded by goggle really diminishes it's independence...

If such a fork happens, I propose the new name be either J-8 or L-10.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

This is the first time I've heard of the Prototype Fund https://prototypefund.de/. Seems to still be active. There is also the Sovereign Tech Fund. Nice to see the German government investing in open source. I have been donating to Thunderbird for a year or so to support the K-9 mail effort and hope it continues.

I have mixed feelings. He took the user interface design into a direction that almost nobody wanted and then he ignored all of the negative community feedback.

If you go look at forum.k9mail.app threads, you can find hundreds, if not thousands, of posts with harsh feedback of the changes he introduced back in 2021 with what I think was the 6.0 release.

Is android K-9 Mail in any way relayed to Symbian K-9 Mail?

K9-Mail is the best mail client i have work with.

Oh no! K-9 Mail is awesome, what a great job you've done. Thanks so much.

Good luck with your next steps.

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