I have literally four different ways to access my main “private, serious” email acount. One is Tbird on my Win desktop, and another, which I use more and more, is K-9 Mail on my Chromebook. (The other two ways I will skip over.) If Tbird and K-9 are merging, will I still be able to use the resulting app on my Chromebook?
We’d have to do extra work to not make the Android app work on Chromebooks. And I don’t see any reason for doing that. So yes, it’ll continue to work 
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I would avoid making the comments of the “If you don’t like it just fork it” kind, its rather annoying. Also, a name has importance, that’s simply true.
Don’t get me wrong, I am really happy with the unfolding of these events, I can’t wait to see the new changes that are still to come, Ijust want to mantain some of the legacy that K9 had on android. Others are even more against these changes, but that’s just what happens when users face new unknown things lol
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I am quite happy about that given K9mail deliberately lacked money (donations) and development power, e.g. see how long it’s material design thing took. And even that is not at all finished.
So Thunderbird could bring that project forward a lot!
So let’s see how that goes. Especially the design could be polished and having proper maintainance, including security fixes etc., is also always a good idea!
IMHO this was a clever move of you two (projects and people behind each one)!
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I have loved k-9 and put it on every Android phone I’ve ever had. I’m disappointed that oauth2 seems to have been ignored and makes the program unusable (or more difficult to use) for Gmail. Maybe the Thunderbird folks can fix this and make the app usable for me again. Thunderbird on desktop has gotten a lot better the past year. So please quickly fix k-9 without all the Mozilla mumbo jumbo that plagues Firefox, but seems to not pull Thunderbird down as much. Thanks.
Hey all,
Ryan Sipes, the Thunderbird Product Manager here. I want to just add my own thoughts here and how Thunderbird sees this relationship, and hopefully that will help some of you feel more at ease and add more fuel to the fire for those who are excited.
I’m a longtime K-9 user. In fact, I don’t really remember a time when I had a smartphone and wasn’t using it (although I’m sure very, very early on a time might have existed). I have an attachment to the K-9 name and its history, and have loved it and continue to love it.
When Cketti and I started talking, I wanted to see how we could best collaborate so that Thunderbird and K-9 users would be happy. But looking at the project and some of the blockers it had, I thought it was pretty clear that a lot of them came down to resources and the time commitments of the people working on K-9. So over time I found myself thinking, “how can we provide resources to the K-9 Mail project and remove the barriers preventing it from getting better?”
One thing I’ll share is that Thunderbird is governed by its community, who approves our budget and top level goals. The K-9 community is now a part of that governance structure and can help set our direction as well. We are in a separate legal entity from Firefox and do not benefit from their revenue, our revenue comes from our users in the form of donations - and donations have been very, very good for us the last few years. As a result our focus is purely on trying to please our users, that’s it. The great donations allow us to invest in the development of K-9 as we are doing.
I say that to make this point: Everyone on the Thunderbird side just wants to see K-9 improve, full stop. No one has voiced any other desired outcomes for K-9 from our end. We want to ensure this project has multiple developers working on it full time producing the best email experience on Android. The name K-9 may live on in some form, as I know it is sentimental to many of you here (perhaps it can live on as a branch that is slightly different than Thunderbird on Android). But ultimately, our focus is the same as K-9’s: privacy, powerful tools and customization, and a focus on open standards and everything being open source. That’s why this works.
I hope with time, all of you see that we are here to help improve a project that you love and that we are making a large commitment to K-9 and this community. I’m looking forward to talking to each of you and understanding what your wants, needs and concerns are. Feel free to DM me here or email me at: ryan@thunderbird.net (I may not reply immediately, but I’ll try to answer everything that comes in).
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Does this mean adding trackers (Google, Amazon, comScore etc) as they have in Firefox on Android?
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I do not hope so!
But Thunderbird is not Firefox
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You mean app telemetry like in Thunderbird? Thunderbird Telemetry | Thunderbird Help
There’s currently no plan to add this. But information on how the app is actually used is helpful when prioritizing development work. If we do add telemetry, you’ll of course be able to disable it. And we’ll use our own servers, not a third-party service.
Thunderbird’s telemetry data is public. You can have a look at it here: https://stats.thunderbird.net/
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If you had any experience of the Mozilla TB devs over the last decade or so then you would know why. I can base my comments on conversations with members of the Council, and devs, along with watchign their lists for years.
No, it is not. They like to say they are, but it is a complete nonsense.
They are not really independent from Mozilla. Mozilla holds the strings and pulls them about like puppets.
They have some very strange ways of muzzling anyone who they don’t like or doesn’t agree with them. A lot of that comes from Mozilla imposed policies.
They have a number of mailing lists that you cannot get on very easily, and others which are heavily moderated. “Free Speech” is out.
They are more than happy to tell you ‘We love it so you will too’. Fingers in ears and ‘lalalalala’
They are happy to completely break things in pursuit of their goals without a by-your-leave for users.
They’ll tell you “the future is email as the number of email addresses is increasing” (of course - people register new devices, but for most young people that is their last use of email), but at the same time develop a chat client…
They claim ‘success’ and ‘the users love it’ when they force upgrade you, and immediately remove all old copies so you cannot go back even if you wanted to because the new version sucks and totally breaks all your plugins, and therefore your business.
They do that without ensuring there are all the API hooks necessary so you can upgrade your plugins making it impossible to upgrade. And then tell you that you are out of date, and do the ‘lalalalala’ trick again.
They have tried to make an email client that is essentially a browser (Follow the Fox - pop ups banned and all tabs which don’t work for a lot of scenarios) with a few bells and whistles, to the point you may pretty well use a web browser and some platform of web based mail software eg Roundcube/Horde/Whatever
So all in all this is an absolutely dire move, but does explain some of the more recent moves at K9.
This means for me a future without both Thunderbird AND K9. Tragic.
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Sounds like a great match for developers who take your donations and say they owe you nothing. Pushing fundamental GUI changes and plucking their ears… Mmh, where have we seen something like that happen recently?
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I was referring to third party trackers for advertising, and I was surprised and disappointed to find them in Firefox given Mozilla’s stance on privacy (and also in Fennec on F-Droid). Telemetry is less concerning, particularly if it is optional.
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Actually, it is, with a few bells & whistles.
With todays version you almost may as well use a browser & webmail.
They purposefully chose to stick with Firefox underneath to save development time so were then forced into the corner of following whatever the FF Moz devs decided. So TB is essentially a skinned, refined browser, like say KomodoIDE or Electron/Chrome based apps
And hence the mess that is TB today, continually struggling to keep up with a browser, and devs who have no interest in a mail client.
Good luck with that.
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Thank you to the k9mail developers for all their hard work. I used both (for a while) and have used a long chain of different mailers over the years… tbird, claws, sylpheed, mutt, my own, mh, bsdmail, gmail, … many are good, many are not so good, some are very obtrusive (because they try to sabotage rather than obey de-facto standards).
Unfortunately, underlying protocols (such as POP3 and IMAP) seem to be the subject of continuing contention among “very moneyed” organizations now processing email internationally for “next to nothing”. If I had to nominate ONE improvement that is sorely needed among all mailers, it is to patch synchronization inside and between protocols to avoid loss of email. That’s why I dropped k9mail. The fact that this problem has existed for more than two decades does not foretell a happy ending… both protocols serve different purposes; worse yet, sync failure covers up losing email accidentally-on-purpose and “that is acceptable”; both protocols are needed, but the industry seems to favor leaving this problem and failing to develop a test suite for synchronization. The problem seems to be in the “enforcement” arena. Clout might be needed.
I am also interested.
Whether there will be third-party trackers for ads
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by third-party trackers. K-9 Mail and Thunderbird are all about privacy. We have absolutely no interest in collecting your data to sell it.
The app does not and will not include ads.
And we’re doing our best to make it hard for others to track you e.g. via tracking pixels in emails. When displaying emails, loading remote content is disabled by default.
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That’s sounds good.
Hopefully I will like Thunderbird same as K9.
I use K9 for many years and I like the new redesign.
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Ich kann als Thunderbird Nutzer unter Linux nur sagen, dass ich mit Thunderbird sehr zufrieden bin. Ich ich diese Neuigkeit erfahren habe, habe ich mir natürlich sofort K9 auf meinem Smartphone installiert.
K9 gefällt mir sehr gut, besser als FairEMail oder Google Mail.
Geben wir den Entwicklern doch einfach einmal eine Chance. Ich bin guter Dinge, dass es prima wird.
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I’ve read several comments here about how disappointed someone is regarding this merger…however, I for one am more than happy to have Thunderbird, in any shape or manner, on my Android mobile phone. I am a Linux user, running Arch, openSUSE and Fedora; use Thunderbird (on my Xfce distros)/Evolution (on my Gnome distros)/KMail (on my Plasma distros); do my utmost to remove anything to do with google from all my devices (except this mobile - I would love a Linux phone - I’m Pine-ing for one) and will have nothing at all to do with microsoft (as far as I can discern - who knows what’s lurking - like fake vaccines to cure fake viruses). So, as someone that’s donated to the Thunderbird cause, when I heard there would be an app coming to the 'phone…
. So, bring it on: contacts, calendar, anything and everything…I’m with you Thunderbird!
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This project now desperately needs a fork, one which will be actually focused on privacy and independence from privacy-intruding and political policies of big tech companies like Mozilla.
This is very disturbing news for me.
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