K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family

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I am a BlackBerry covert to Android and I can say that BlackBerry had the best email functionality of all phones, Android is just a joke in comparison, but I digress.

Now, when I was forced to migrate due to BlackBerry shutdown in Jan 2022 I tested many apps on Android: Outlook, Bluemail, Aquamail, Gmail, etc, etc. And they all were cr@p - display huge ads, steal user info, look ugly, or just clunky UI and annoying to work with.

I now use K-9 Mail (what a name!) because it’s more or less clean UI, doesn’t have ads and is based on open source. There is still long ways to go to meet BlackBerry level, like when push doesn’t drain battery and you don’t have to worry and manually refresh to make sure there are no new emails that sync didn’t get.

I am super excited to hear that Thunderbird took K9 Mail under it’s wing and I hope that it will bring additional firepower in terms of developer involvement, fixing push so that it works seamlessly and improve that ugly 3.2 star user rating on Google play. Also I hope this will help to fight against Google when important features need to be reviewed, I’m sure Google will be more willing to review&approve code when Mozilla asks for it, rather than someone from K-9. Best of luck to the team!!!

With regards to traditional users of K-9 Mail, I’m sure some of you are unhappy, like I was unhappy about BlackBerry shutdown it’s servers, otherwise I would still be using it. But let’s face it, prime time of K-9 mail was over, user rating is down, it doesn’t even show up when you type “Mail” in Play store, you have to search for it. It was the underdog of mail apps. There needs to be a “reboot” to bring K9 back to the stage, so it can compete with Outlook, Gmail and the like. And I hope that Thunderbird will give those powers to K9.

User input oftentimes leads to more useless features and more bloat. I hope that doesn’t happen to K9, like that they don’t try to now manage calendar and contacts which Android already does, and just focus on email app. But worst case you can always manually install .APK of your favourite version (which doesn’t update) and use it forever until the end of time.

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You should stay far away from anything Mozilla. I used to be a devoted Firefox user but finally dumped Firefox this year for Chromium.
TB has too much Mozilla baggage. Both are developed with glacial pace.
Mozilla has ruined these OSS projects with their politics and flawed development.
You will get no resources from those clowns just be politically indoctrinated.

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I’ve used Thunderbird for almost 20 years on both Windows & Linux. I’ve tried all sorts of email clients on Android. I work from and with email and find K9 a good fit. That said I will revel in sync between not only my mobile clients with servers bit also among my devices & desktops. I expect that Thunderbird will make that happen.

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No it’s not “only good”. K-9 had been ruined for actual thousands of users after version 5.6. They’ve all left as users. This was because its UI was good the way it was. It did not need extras or changes, just like a toilet-flushing system does not need changes for it to keep functioning. Where does this strange urge to ruin and alter perfectly fine software come from? Openssh, ssh, midnight commander, apache, nginx have not seen core-UI changes for decades. Not that they have actual GUIs, but their interfaces, the way you use those, has not changed. You get my point. I hope.

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I agree. As if writing ‘Period’ makes it final. It’s not religion, it’s not ‘the bible’. Again, and I’m not the only one who stands behind this;
If k-9 was what it still was at version 5.6, and the dev team would have asked for money in order to bring the back-end (not the GUI/UI) up to (android and email) security-standards, they could have even made upgrading optional only after getting paid (say, 1 euro per user), its users would ALL have paid. (They did this in the early days with WhatsApp. Worked like a charm.) Many OSS devs seem to forget that when an app is actually good and widely used, people are really willing to pay for its continued usage. The only requirement is a model that makes paying for it easy, and checking for users having paid or not implemented without interfering with the usability of the app’s function.
Changing core functionality of an email app that is being used by thousands is just dumb.

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I have used Thunderbird since it was integral to Netscape (Yes, I’m that old), and have been very happy with the product. I have used K-9 mail since moving to an Android phone from my Blackberry years ago, and I’ve been satisfied, but a little disappointed in the development. I’ve been hoping for an Android TBird app for a long time. Hopefully, this will be the best of both. My only sad thought is that the K-9 logo will go away. Where is Sarah and the Doctor when you need them? SAVE THE LOGO!!!

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I’m late to the party, however I would like to add one more positive voice toward this merger.

I run my own mailserver and infrastructure. I am using Thunderbird, Mutt and K-9 with multiple accounts for many years now.

Like many others I like the K-9 name and logo and wish they could be preserved. Howerver, I see everything else as positivie improvements.

I understand that running a FOSS project is hard. You can not support neighter the project nor yourself with onetime donations, or it will be very limited. You need resources to catch up with all the changes and stay relevant, specially with E-Mail where the big names out there have plenty of resources to redefine what E-Mail is.

Therefore, I’m very glad to hear that K-9 is getting more resources. Gaining momentum is hard, both Thunderbird and K-9 have momentum. And it’s something you won’t get in any fork. A fork by itself is meaningless, unless you are a community forking. It’s about resources. I have made a few small patches to K-9 and everytime I got excellent answers and support from cketti, and no one else. Excellent answers however, come from lots of study folks, you have to get to those RFCs and read them and it takes time, beside getting to your personal life and private problems, how much time is left there then? Not much I’d guess from trying to run my own projects…

And as long as the project is maintaining its core values such as privacy and open standards, I see the merger a net benefit to the community as a whole.

So, congratulations for getting more resources and a new home! Good luck!

-mehdi

Edit: some typos

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How about a K9 desktop client for Windows? Ive been waiting and waiting for Tbird to get act together with K9 but sync problems between android and desktop keep plaguing me to the point of dropping both for something else.

Tired of seeing an email with attachment on phone then it not being anywhere to be found on desktop to download to get the same email

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Thunderbird is for Windows - I’ve never had any issues seeing my emails or attachments on both phone and desktop.
Easiest way is to use IMAP - I switched to it years ago and couldn’t be happier with my mail clients :sunglasses:

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and MacOS and Linux…

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I know that lol - but he was asking for a WINDOWS desktop client which Thunderbird is, and that was my point :wink:

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Can anyone suggest an alternative which is less likely to become a bloated piece of shit over the next couple of years?

That’s not a rhetorical question. As someone familiar with both K9 and Thunderbird, I can already see the writing on the wall. Is anyone forking K9 before the inevitable happens? K10, perhaps?

Or is there another option which caters to those who just want a simple mail client?

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Not sure you’ll get decent answers here given the vertical focus on K-9 in this web forum.

I myself am looking forward to continued evolution for K-9 and Thunderbird desktop | Android.

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I guess I’m asking here since I can’t be the only one worried about “being welcomed into the Thunderbird family”, or whatever flowery language is being used to describe the usurpation of the K-9 project by Mozilla.

Mozilla used to be a bastion of free software. These days they seem more interested in creating an aesthetic targeted at 13 year old girls than actually producing decent software. The degree of bloat and feature-creep in Thunderbird over the past several years has been immense.

You can almost get away with it on the desktop, but on a mobile device with limited resources, not so much. There’s a reason nobody uses Fennec. I’m concerned that the same fate awaits K-9, and genuinely interested in what others who share the same concerns will be moving to instead.

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I am sad to say that K9 has become the source of a difficult to use application called Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is a terrible application that gets in the way when you are working on email with a “donation request” prompt.
Please think about this and look at it carefully. The fact that both K9 and Thunderbird can only change two new account letters is fatal to the stress of sending and receiving mail, and the inability to manage accounts. And yet I get a “donation request” in such a situation. If you are going to do something this ridiculous, I recommend you use FairEmail. If Thunderbird is all you have left, it’s time to give up and choose another application.

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Thanks. FairEmail looks like a decent and actively maintained alternative. I’ll check it out.

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