Such nonsense. K9mail could have been forever. You could easily keep the old UI and update the backend. Have you ever for example seen Forté Agent? It has not changed because its users want it to be usable.
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Apparently he is. What an idiot. Has he even looked at the Playstore score recently? not one user is satisfied with the changes.
@cketti I have to say after trial and error. K9 5.8 is exactly what I wanted. Now there are a few things I like to see returned but those are minor quips and of course future updates can address those things with those items returning or even a better way to implement them. For the years of hard work put into this I have to say thank you. The UI is more polished and I did find things easy to locate once I got used to the UI changes. This feels more polished and less clunky. I have no doubt it was hard to balance the need for function that K9 was always known for with polishing the UI and workflow to look more pleasing to the eye. Balancing form and function is a lot harder then it sounds. I find this to be a great start in a new direction and look forward to what you and your team will accomplish in the future. Again thank you and your team for this. 
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First off, I appreciate the devs efforts and am glad there is active development on this app after a period where it appeared it might be dead.
With that said, I’m surprised that in 2021, a hamburger menu that opens a nav drawer ever made it past the “suggestion” phase. Very poor design and usability, there’s a reason why Google and other apps have abandoned this feature.
My suggestion - ditch the hamburger menu and nav drawer. Implement a bottom nav with one of the buttons spawning a bottom sheet dialog displaying the list of accounts many users want back.
As a developer, I appreciate the amount of time and effort something like this would require. But there are no deal-breakers here. There are several examples of apps that have made similar changes. As far as amount of work, of course all apps are different, with their own set of variables, potential blockers, etc. With that said, I’ve been on Scrum teams where a single dev has accomplished this type of feature change in one or two sprints. Yes, there’s solid work involved, but not exactly an “epic” change. Just trying to provide some perspective.
But even if it took longer and supplanted some other planned changes, doing this would improve the app’s usability 100% not to mention restore some goodwill between devs and users. And I don’t care how much devs might claim poor feedback and one star ratings mean nothing to them. Don’t believe it. Programming is challenging work, and it’s always gratifying to hear one’s work has been worthwhile and has helped make others’ experience better. Nobody wants to hear that their hard work and effort “sucks.”
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Lots of negativity here, I’m just going to throw in my voice here and say I’m a fan of the new UI. I was running the beta version just to get the new UI early. Thanks for all your hard work @cketti, I decided to subscribe on liberapay after seeing 5.8. I hope you get some helpful comments on how to satisfy the people who liked the old UI while keeping the raft of improvements in 5.8.
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Action bar on the top, overview of 5 email accounts missing, ugly home screen icon
… Happy again with 5.600
(Appreciate the work on the new version, but in this case the older is the better)
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Hey everybody!
I’m a little late but it was yesterday when I upgraded to 5.8
First off: I like the new way of handling encryption, autocrypt and stuff. And I’m happy there’s still development after all the years I’m using K9. … and I like the new coloring… looks a bit more modern (although I’m an old-fashioned guy)
But with the latest update there came so many negatives for me which let me struggle whether to stick with K9 or to move on to a more usable alternative.
I really miss the mailbox overview. There I had a immediate overview what’s happing where (I’m using 5 mailboxes) right when I started the app. Now I’ve to tap x-times to get the information I need.
Of course all new mails are bundled in the unified inbox… but it’s just confusing… I never get who sent which mail to which mailbox. The little color codes are not really helpful: I don’t know (yet) what color is standing for which mailbox… for color-blind people it’s just impossible to figure ANYTHING out of the unified mailbox.
And then there’s the privacy issue… do I really want to have ALL Mails in the unified inbox? When I have to show a customer a specific e-mail… do I want him to get a glance at the senders or subjects of private e-mails, just because they are all stuffed in these mix-bowl-inbox? Sure I could navigate to the customer specific mailbox first… but that’s unnecessary taps again.
When reading an email, the menu bar now sits top-screen, which is counter-productive. My fingers are at the lower part of the screen… the previous version let me use the menu (fwd, back, delete…) with my thumbs just easily … now I have to take one hand off the phone to reach the menu buttons… not cool.
Next, I don’t get what’s up with these “person”-icons on top inside the hamburger menu. I know they stand for single mailboxes which would make switching the mailboxes fast… but why are there only 3 when I’m using 5 mailboxes? Is this adjustable somewhere?
The great features which kept me using K9 for almost a decade are gone now.
And (hopefully) lastly: why does the K9 icon (Android phone) now have a PINK background? … it’s always been subtl… quiet… not eye catching… that’s gone now.
To summarize: modern look, easy access encryption features: great…
the big loss in usability: a real bummer…
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Hey everybody,
received the update yesterday - and just got back to 5.6 as i don´t have the time to test other apps right now…
Missing the overview screen, which was a perfect case of usability for multiple email accounts. Never used the unified inbox - as I want to separate private mails from the other ones, but it offered an overview of how many new mails there are in the different inboxes when opening K-9.
Second feature lacking is the short way to get to the marked mails per account - from the overview screen. Seems there is no adequate option in 5.8 anymore.
Buttons placed at the bottom in 5.6 is clearly better than the new positions for handling a bigger smartphone, too.
I really appreciate that there still is development - but in my case the 5.8 is just “useless”.
So many things going on in this thread, I’m really having some fun!
We have a brave developer willing to make a living out of an open-source app originally designed by others, who comes in and and says the development is now targeted at himself as the sole living use case (no, wait, he rectifies and now says all the devs active “in the last two years” count in as well).
Then someone exposes the “german taxpayer affaire” and we learn that this brave new developer is getting public money for writing code for his own personal interests. After that the brave new developer appears a little less brave and starts behaving like he has some interests on users’ opinions. A coincidence?
That being said, dear @cketti, the main point here is that K-9 has never been your own personal project. You took over and are managing a codebase that, in the years, has seen the contribution of many others. Even if their code is now gone, they contributed to the success of the App and you are literally milking money out of this success.
When somebody used the word “ethics” previously on the this thread, I think he had a point; being the new lead developer of a project started by others is mainly a responsibility and it is a responsibility towards the current users and towards the past devs.
If you feel like you do not want to deal with that, it’s all good and sassy, that’s the beauty of open source: you start a new fork, change the name of the project and go your way.
But you decided to stitch with K-9 because you need the userbase (what other reason when you’re saying you’re only interested at the “myself use case”?).
Now the userbase has something to say, and no, it’s not only a “few people”.
I do agree that the App needed a UI refresh and it’s unavoidable that someone was going to complain because the new UI does not fit their usual workflow.
The question is; can they reach the same goals with a different workflow? And if so, with the same cognitive effort or with a larger one? Oh, c’mon, this is UI design 101, we all know that, right?
In my opinion the correct way to deal with such changes is to say to the users: this is what we feel like it’s a reasonably modern, pleasing, effective UI.
We start from here and, if we have the resources, we are willing to add improvements only if there is enough request (again: it’s matter of request, it comes from the users, it does not boils down to you being convinced by the users) and if they do not break the current design principles. Was that so difficult? I’m convinced you are going to do it anyway in the long run, you just could have saved yourself from all this chaos.
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Actually, cketti was basically there from the beginning. He did not just take over the project recently. If you look at the charts, you can see that while there were some other devs over the years, none of them is even close to what cketti contributed. Without cketti, K-9 would have basically been dead 6 years ago - long before the redesign.
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Look, I have a couple of projects on github with which I basically made available tools I developed for myself. I state very clearly in the readme that this is a personal project, I do gladly accept bug reports but I’m not about “supporting users”, I’m just making available these tools in the hope they can be useful to others, but that’s it.
Whoever decides to contribute, knows what he/she’s doing.
This is now hot K-9 presents itself. I’m sure most (all?) the ones who submitted code in the past did that with the implicit idea of contributing to an App developed for a community of users, not for the developers “active in the last two years”.
That said, again, I find nothing reprehensible with what cketti is doing. The app needed a code and a UI refresh. What he did is no worse that what many other are doing. I personally dislike the general App dumbing-down (we and not all Apple users) but I’m not complaining about that. I also understand the idea of stating with use cases collected by the needs of active developers.
The point here is about project and community management in the open source world.
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I’m another user who signed up for the forum in disappointment over the 5.8 release. Maybe it was in development for years, but this is a big change that warranted a lot more communication to users.
I’ve been using K-9 for around a decade, and it looks like I’ll be downgrading or moving on to another app. It’s a melancholy feeling, like the loss of a friend.
For me, it’s mostly inbox view changes that provide a worse experience than what they replaced.
- In inbox view, tapping and swiping either direction now opens messages (!?), long-press starts multiselect, and selected message actions are split between visible buttons and less-visible entries behind a three-dots menu. It used to be really fast and fluid to swipe to begin multiselect for deletion, or long-press for a descriptive list of all available actions on a message.
- All message action buttons were moved to the top of the screen in inbox and message views, but my thumbs are shorter than all my other fingers and phones keep getting bigger. Even with huge hands my thumbs don’t reach those icons on a 5.4" screen. This is the single design choice I cannot fathom, and I would love to read the use case behind it. Even if the reason is that the devs use their phones two-handed or have sub-5" screens (tell me where you found them).
- Accounts no longer reinforce their identities with color chips at the edge in inbox view. I get a little lost.
- Now that color chips are gone, inbox view subject lines are closer to the left edge of the screen. My phone screen has curved edges, so subject lines are harder to read now. The extra margin from the color chips helped.
- Notifications now sometimes show new messages with previews, and sometimes only show an unread count with no message previews. I don’t know why there are two kinds of notifications. Only the new message preview is useful to me. Bare unread counts aren’t helpful/meaningful to me at all, but also that number isn’t the unread count for the server inbox, it’s the unread count for whatever slice of the inbox K-9 is configured to load.
- Network activity status messages no longer appear in the header when polling a server, so I can’t tell if the app is “stuck” or something’s wrong with my network.
- The notification icon is less recognizable. It looks a lot like the DM icon for one or more of my social media apps.
This app was a core part of my daily routine for years and years and years, through changing jobs and moves and vacations and conferences and email-from-bed. Now quick actions are physically difficult to perform. I was surprised to learn I was using an app that was being modified to scratch someone’s itch. 
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It was communicated on all channels that K-9 has over the last 2+ years: On the forum, on GitHub, on Twitter and on the website. Showing a popup message within the app would not have been possible because the old version was so outdated that Google no longer allowed uploading updates.
You can touch the contact icon for quick multi-select. Swipe selection was removed in order to be able to add proper swipe actions (like for deletion) later.
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Find the notification dot… Pink in pink… C’mon… I already removed my years old wallpaper to something darker to be able to see the notification.
The envelope top left is a pure exception from the rule. There’s usually just the tiny dot …indicating I’ve mail, matrix and signal messages to check.
(Why pink??)
It was communicated on all channels that K-9 has over the last 2+ years: On the forum, on GitHub, on Twitter and on the website. Showing a popup message within the app would not have been possible because the old version was so outdated that Google no longer allowed uploading updates.
It’s good that those other channels carried updates. Since it’s an app on my phone, I would’ve expected an announcement via a pre-release update to the app on my phone. It’s clear there are a bunch of people here who, like me, don’t follow our apps’ social media or web presences. I think that’s an unusual way to get news about apps installed on our phones.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the old version was so outdated that Google no longer allowed uploading updates”… I received an automatic update to v5.8. Did the store require you to make substantial changes to the v5.6 codebase to meet newer requirements before submitting, or similar? It might’ve been worth it? Or, it would be worth having a mitigation strategy in case the same situation occurs with v5.8+.
You can touch the contact icon for quick multi-select. Swipe selection was removed in order to be able to add proper swipe actions (like for deletion) later.
I have contact icons turned off because I don’t use them. Swipe actions like that would be a big improvement. 
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Yes, exactly. Many things had to be rewritten to be able to upload updates again. That’s why it took 3 years of continued development since the last stable release.
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Latest update (go straight to default folder on account selection) + the way you can refresh all accounts from the drop-down account menu with a pull pretty much sorts my reservations with the new UI.
It’s still an extra press here and there, and using the back button is a no no, but I’ve nearly got muscle memory now.
Nice work.
Well, that’s an unfortunate situation which I understand. Thanks for explaining it.
Yes we get it, cketti has been there for a number of years doing the work…Thanks!
But it doesn’t excuse his condescending and dismissive attitude to anyone who is rightfully disappointed with the Major changes to the ui since 5.6.
He needs to realise that this is not his pet project as much as you feel that it is. Fork it off and change the name and develop it as such if that’s what some of you guys want. But keeping it as K-9 Mail, it belongs to everyone who uses it. Tens of thousands of people use it in their daily lives for personal and business use and to effectively say “stuff you all” this is the way we’re changing it is just wrong.
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It was communicated on all channels that K-9 has over the last 2+ years: On the forum, on GitHub, on Twitter and on the website
Normally a user is not following an app anywhere, I guess. So that might be why so many users are so suprised about the update. Same for using betas.
If an app has never changed its look or behaviour it is than a big shock to get a completly “different app” after an update.
If there is a design change, okay. If there is a change in functionality, okay… but this is a massive change users proclaiming bout and mostly the update removed the outstanding functionality of K-9, which made is so different comparing to other email-clients.
I am really glad people still developing K-9, which i used for many many years. And i normally do not complain or comment (like many new users here, it seems).
So, assuming that many people were obviously really suprised and really like K-9 (that is why they are willing to comment) I really hope the dev-team is rethinking about the most missed usability-features and offers options to switch standard-behaviour of K-9 in further releases, that would be great.
Otherwise I have switch to fairmail or similar as well, although I do not want to actually
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