K-9 + Thunderbird

Is the K-9 integration to Thundebird still on track?

Is there any particular reason for sharing your insecurities?

Sure it is, on Twitter Thunderbird announced updates for K-9 already :sunglasses:

“Is there any particular reason for sharing your insecurities?” - Milo

Not insecure, Milo. A legitimate question. The awareness of the TBird Android app is growing so clients like mine have a professional interest and questions. Your response, on the other hand, not so professional. I will give the forum the benefit of the doubt that the majority of members are more constructive, as demonstrated by the response by Nimueh. Thank you Nimueh.

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K-9 kat turned out to be a relatively useless app over time. This explains the fantastic success of Fairmail.
K-9 has always blocked anyone who asked if there is still active development. All the Thunderbird developers are now on ubuntu. And then Mozilla said, oops, now we try to reactivate K-9, but they don’t know that K-9 has outdated code for almost 10 years and nobody can solve the tangle.

Strange - I get updates for K9. Currently in Beta phase, 6.50x. So, I cannot agree that there is no active development.

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Very little to NOTHING. There are 2 big things that need to be fixed.

  1. Mails must not be opened in a webview. In the default configuration of K-9, mails are actually rendered in a WebView that relies on the device’s rendering engine. Since WebViews on Android are based on the same rendering engine as the device’s default web browser, JavaScript, cookies, and frames may indeed run unrestrained. This should be on the very first page:
    “>>> We promise you 10 times more spam than you have now! <<<”.

If you don’t know what a webview is, it probably doesn’t bother you. A WebView is a view element in a mobile app that allows you to display a web page or part of a web page in the app. It’s basically an embedded version of a web browser in a mobile app.
WebViews use a rendering engine to process HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to display an interactive user interface. All the features of the browser can be used, including the ability to click links, fill out forms, and run JavaScript.
I remember very well a conversation in 2008 or 2009 Kevin, Jesse or Dan, there was talk about displaying emails in text format in an editor. And what has become of it ? => WEBVIEW
Fairemail does it like this. Fairemail converts the emails to text and displays the text.
However, it is important to note that any email you receive may contain potentially malicious code, and it is advisable to be careful and not open emails from unknown senders or with suspicious attachments or links. All because the dopey email clients open the emails in web browsers. If emails were opened in text editors, we wouldn’t have to talk about it.

  1. The client is not maildir capable, if the imap server does not work with labels the accounts will be displayed badly. That’s why there is no decent folder structure. K-9 developers were all big GMail fans at the time, and they wanted tags, not folders like GMail has.
    Gmail uses an extension to the IMAP protocol called “X-GM-EXT-1” that allows emails to be uniquely identified by tags instead of folders. In the traditional IMAP protocol, emails are organized into folders or directories, with each email associated with a specific folder. In Gmail, however, emails are tagged with labels or tags that allow users to assign multiple categories or keywords to emails and organize them more flexibly.

And my friend, nothing significant has happened since then. In 2008 nobody wrote K-9 either. K-9 was originally started as a fork of the email client “Android Email” which was part of the Android operating system. Android Email was developed by Google and was the default email client on Android devices until Gmail was introduced as the default email client. The developers of K-9 have taken the Android Email code and improved it by fixing some bugs.

That is wrong. K-9 disables all these things for the WebViews it displays.

Really? Just because the developers don’t implement your favorite feature, you assume they do nothing?

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