- the central refresh button is needed because I have several accounts that I only want to see when I actually pick them up. E.g. I want to see Geocaching.com emails only when I manually refresh. Also I can’t use a unified inbox here, because e.g. the Geocaching.com emails (thousands) should not be shown in a unified inbox. That’s what account separation is for. Also, when I’m on vacation, I set all accounts to manually refresh because I don’t want to see any messages at all unless I explicitly pick it up with the refresh button. And likewise, having accounts always refresh in the background is not an option for me with some accounts as I only want to refresh them when I want to.
- the quick overview of all accounts was very helpful to get a quick overview. Now you have to open the menu, select the account list, select the other account and then switch to the inbox. How cumbersome is that. Just because such menus are hip doesn’t mean you can really use them as a quick user. I find these menus user-hostile because they are also not intuitive to use. They are only useful for new users who need to find their way around.
- unfortunately, with the change, the unique selling point of K9 is lost as the interface now feels like Gmail. That’s exactly why I didn’t use Gmail. Also, with Gmail, I ALWAYS have to look at the Gmail account, which I don’t even care that it’s just an account to unlock the phone with.
- I use K9 now felt over 10 years and was very happy with the fast access and central updating. Now it becomes unusable for me. You are taking away the ability for users to use K9 the way they want and trying to bring all users on a par with other email apps, which in my view K9 was not meant to be from the start. If this is the reason that you wanted to bring the masses to K9 I think this is the wrong approach since the other email apps exist specifically for this purpose.
Sorry, but here writes a software developer who is driving UI design in a larger company and who was very convinced of the quick overview, one-button refresh and one click into each inbox.
If I use folders with structures for my mails, then on a desktop computer with Thunderbird and a set of rules that sorts all important emails. Mobile is just a quick way for me to stay up to date on the go.