21 ms·

Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

724 points by HieronymusBosch 4y ago

warabe 4y ago
This is a wonderful news! Finally, k9 mail will come with OAuth functionality!! or won't they?
- forbiddenlake 4y ago
  Yes; this work was started even before the latest FairEmail kerfluffle, and is slated for K-9 6.200. https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655#issuecomment-1131656000 https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655#issuecomment-113165...
who_is_mr_tux 4y ago
My favorite mobile email app now working with my favorite desktop email app. Love it!
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  It does not support IMAP at first glance. The wizard has only POP3 config option.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    Ah, nope. Manual config has it. I wonder whether IDLE command is supported, but we'll see.
emodendroket 4y ago
Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I worry about a loss of focus when Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category on the desktop, which is much less true on mobile.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  The two work in tandem, though. I use Firefox on mobile because I use Firefox on desktop. That and it being the only Android browser that runs uBlock Origin, of course. I currently use Thunderbird on desktop, but use a combination of Gmail and Outlook on Android. If Thunderbird picks up K-9 mail and turns it into a first-class mobile client, I'll probably use Thunderbird instead of the Outlook app. People like consistency.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      Why be so condescending? Also, they could use Firefox on mobile to keep their history and bookmarks in sync across devices in addition to some extensions they find useful, like uBlock Origin as they mentioned. Just because the number of extensions is less than desktop doesn't mean the extensions that do exist aren't game changers for them.
    - pritambaral 4y ago
      Hey, 3 > 0. How many do you enjoy?
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        You missed the good old days of firefox on android supporting hundreds of extensions. progress, I guess?
        input_sh 4y ago
        Ah yeah, back when page load lasted 3x as long as Chrome (on a lower end device at least). I've installed the rewrite back when it was called Firefox Preview.
      - binarysneaker 4y ago
johntony678 4y ago
[flagged]
sureglymop 4y ago
FairEmail seems a lot more feature filled and better than K9. I think it even tops Desktop Thunderbird.
- xcambar 4y ago
  Fairemail is worth every penny I've donated to the project and more.
- stratom 4y ago
  I personally also use FairEmail, but I appreciate that there is an viable opensource alternative.
  - zen_1 4y ago
    FairEmail is also open source [1] [1]: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/ https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/
- itintheory 4y ago
  I thought they were gone after the developer had a fit: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/19/fairemail-developer-calls-it-quits-and-pulls-apps-from-google-play/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/19/fairemail-developer-calls-... but I guess the issue is resolved and they've recanted?
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  I keep going back and forth between the two. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses the other lacks. Currently, I'm on FairEmail because its IMAP IDLE client implementation seems so much better than K-9's. On the UI side, FairEmail is trying harder to keep up with the Material Treadmill, but still manages to seem less polished.
ekianjo 4y ago
Not thrilled. I use K9 and I don't really want Thunderbird to have anything to do with it :/
- prmoustache 4y ago
  You realize it is the same developer and can leave thunderbird whenever he is not happy with the direction it takes?
  - wallmountedtv 4y ago
    Yeah but they cannot take Thunderbird mobile back. Its now Mozilla property, which is the actual scary part.
    - goodusername 4y ago
      Thunderbird mobile will be open source, so they, or anybody else can fork it, and continue development independently of Mozilla, using a different brand. It will not be "Mozilla property".
    - Valmar 4y ago
      They can take it back. Heard of Betterbird? Yeah, a Thunderbird port.
zecg 4y ago
I'll be certain to use whatever fork of K-9 is available rather than anything Mozilla. WHERE'S THE SAVE TO PDF OPTION on mobile Firefox?
- prophesi 4y ago
  Same way you have to do it on Chrome iOS; Share the page, select print, and zoom in on the thumbnail to have it generate a PDF you can save.
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    I don't see that option on mine...But I use Fennec from Fdroid, so maybe that's why.
- gnomewascool 4y ago
  You'll be happy to know that Thunderbird is for better or worse now mostly independent Mozilla's leadership.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  The worst thing with Firefox Mobile is that they still force you to use addon collections to use the most basic addons.
CivBase 4y ago
I'm curious how Mozilla feels "Thunderbird on Android" aligns with their mission statement. Thunderbird was practically the de facto alternative to Outlook back when desktop clients were the standard for email. But there have been plenty of quality email clients on Android for a long time. Does buying a popular competitor and re-branding it as Thunderbird really help to "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"? I'm worried this will just end up being another ongoing expense for Mozilla.
- warabe 4y ago
  There are a lot of "closed source" email clients on Android. I tried to find free, open source email clients, but found only k9 and FairEmail.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  I can understand Mozilla wanting to employ someone that works on possibly the most popular Foss email client for android, so as to keep it maintained. That goes in line with their mission statement. The rebrand, I'm sure it's a requirement for the funding, and it makes sense they'd want that. I'm just wary of Mozilla products these days. I'm tired of important tools I use just losing functionality while blog posts pay lip service to power users and internet freedom.
ig-88ms 4y ago
Let's hope K9-Mail gets a more attractive UI. It always felt more clunky than it needed to be.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Have you tried the new 6.000?
- mid-kid 4y ago
  Its classic android 4 gmail-esque-but-refreshed look is the main reason I use it. It works really well for me, and I kind of miss the primary screen for accounts it used to have, now being delegated to a popout on the sidebar.
OptionX 4y ago
I would normally be wary of such a merger/acquisition, but as a long time user of thunderbird on the desktop this is actually exciting. At least I don't predict K-9 getting worse and has the distinct possibility of getting better and getting more features.
darkwater 4y ago
Oh I was just going to finally configure K9 on my Android to replace the "native" Fastmail client, which sucks A LOT when you don't have internet connection, so this is great news. I really don't understand why it cannot work without internet connection, I'm no Android developer but locally caching the last month / 500MB of messages can't be that complicated.
longrod 4y ago
If there was one product where Mozilla could have really shined, it was Thunderbird. There's nothing like it in the FOSS world. Sadly they deprioritized it over Firefox resulting in the death of both.
javajosh 4y ago
As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, its very existence undermines the motivation to start something new. Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler? I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components. An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? And (for office docs) maybe with a more thoughtful file format, like a simple html subset. Does this exist? And if so where do I get it? (And maybe there are better "jumping off points", like VSCode, which is itself a specialization of Electron).
- will0 4y ago
  Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. (I like electron fwiw, it's enabled me to have a desktop experience with applications that would've otherwise never come to linux)
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. Thank you for recognizing this. I admit I had a moment of doubt before pressing "submit". :)
    - viraptor 4y ago
      Keep in mind electron is just one way to go. There's Tauri for example, offering a very similar solution.
  - ape4 4y ago
    Email clients need to display full html/css/js now
    - 4y ago
smdotdev 4y ago
imalerba 4y ago
Long time Thunderbird in Linux user, had to switch to Mutt a few months ago. Having 3 inboxes configured was taking, for some reason, +10Gb of disk and several Gb of RAM, plus being painfully slow and freeze pretty often.
- alyandon 4y ago
  I eventually had to switch off Thunderbird as well for similar reasons and just live with mutt. TB just really didn't perform well at all on large mailboxes (dozens of folders, thousands of messages per folder) without freezing the UI, gobbling gigabytes of ram, etc - it is obviously not targeted at my use case.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  Disk space is as much as you have mail. If not, there is something wrong with your profile. I have 15 GB of mail across 5 email accounts and Thunderbird is currently sitting at 350 MB RAM. Rarely crosses 500MB, I think. I am encountering some freezes and occasional crashes which are annoying, but on linux there is nothing better.
- sillystuff 4y ago
  With several 10s of thousands of messages (~70 GB) in my accounts, I also had issues with TB using tons of disk space even when set to not copy messages locally. The issue was TB's global search index. If you disable global search indexing in your config, then manually delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file, you can free up those 10+ GB. My fix for most annoyances was to copy mail locally, and run dovecot locally on the same box as TB (TB doesn't support standard maildir). I also added a wrapper script that does a VACUUM on all the sqlite dbs in the profile when starting TB. With the above, TB has worked well for me.
  - LoveGracePeace 4y ago
    I didn't realize how many sqlite files there are, I ran "find . -name *.sqlite", I see Chrome related files, cookie files, a file related to storage? Time to look for a new email client which is sad to say after all these years.
xg15 4y ago
I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbird team had many discussions on how we might provide a great mobile experience for our users. In the end, we didn’t want to duplicate effort if we could combine forces with an existing open-source project that shared our values. Over years of discussing ways K-9 and Thunderbird could collaborate, we decided it would best serve our users to work together. I don't want to say this is bad for K9, bit I still wonder what will happen to existing K9 installs. If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?
- happyopossum 4y ago
  > isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.
  - xg15 4y ago
    I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.
    - notRobot 4y ago
      While not commonplace, it's not unheard of for app UI/UXes to be changed completely over an update.
    - Taywee 4y ago
      Is there anything in the announcement that says that people who installed K-9 mail would find that it has silently turned into Thunderbird? I'd assume this would involve a separate install, as it'll probably have a separate app ID indicating the Thunderbird connection. In any case, I've had installed apps have the name change as a part of rebranding before. It's a little bit jarring sometimes, but name changes happen. They're usually small name changes, but I don't thing taking "K-9 mail is continuing development with a new name" as "app becoming something completely different" is really fair. Unless the functionality and UX completely changes, I don't think it's fair to read a name change as something so negative that needs to be "protected against".
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
Hoping it will be on F-Droid...
ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
This is fantastic news all around! I recall the K-9 developer needing additional funding in the past, so this is great news for that project [0]. In addition, I'd much rather use "thunderbird" on mobile as an extension of K9, since it has thus far been my favourite mobile client. Work in the most recent years has been wonderful, and it's a pleasure to use (although I've vastly cut down on mail on mobile because hey, a keyboard is better). Overall, this seems like it makes a lot of sense. Hopefully this will mean that the shift to supporting a mobile client won't detract from the good stuff desktop Thunderbird is doing as well. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131509
pmontra 4y ago
As a Thunderbird and K-9 user this is 51% good news and 49% possibly bad new. Good news because it should increase the chances that the two products will live a longer life. Possibly bad news because I'm one of the crowd that went back to K-9 5.600 because the new version destroyed the UI that was the primary reason why we picked K-9 over other apps. 100% self selection bias here. There was maybe an ongoing effort to offer the old interface as an option. I'm not sure Mozilla's going to invest into that. On the other side, the way I'm using Thunderbird is very close to the old K-9. A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client.
- neop1x 4y ago
  Same here. I had been a happy K9 user until they redesigned the interface. Putting a message action toolbar on the top for a smartphone app doesn't make any sense. Especially as smartphones are getting taller and taller. I then switched to FairMail. I will re-consider going back if this is fixed.
- cookiengineer 4y ago
  Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. They abandoned Thunderbird and it's a totally separate community project these days.
  - mqus 4y ago
    I probably know less than you, but at least the linked donations page https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/k9mail/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/k9mail/ has heavy mozilla branding and also talks about "Mozilla Thunderbird"... thunderbird.net states at the bottom: Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
    - conradev 4y ago
      Thunderbird operates independently within Mozilla: > There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
btdmaster 4y ago
I really hope this leads to an improvement (reduction) to the stuff Thunderbird pings[0]. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/
deleted 4y ago
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0des 4y ago
Completely off topic, but did anybody spot the actual fed in the comments? Didnt know people just post on random nerd forums trying to sell drugs. That's wild.
aidenn0 4y ago
I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1]. It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are going to be different, it should be to some purpose, but after 6 months of using it I still don't see any purpose. There are still some vestiges of its previous Eudora-like interface, but everywhere it is different from Eudora, it is to no purpose I can fathom. 1: The other two I could find are Evolution and davmail (which bridges EWS to imap). There may be more now; I last looked about a year ago. I can unreservedly say that using Evolution is better experience than Thunderbird, though its underlying architecture is a bit bizarre.
- jraph 4y ago
  I don't know. I've been using it since 2005. Its UI is stable and efficient. Gets the job done and does not get in the way. And it's free software. You are not actually saying what you don't like about Thunderbird so it's hard to oppose anything to your comment. Why Thunderbird should change its UI if it works okay? Gratuitously different from what by the way? And to me, the UIs of Evolution and KMail don't seem that much different from Thunderbird's and from what I've seem from Outlook, same thing. There's a pane listing inboxes and folders, there's a pane showing the content of the selected folder and there's a pane showing the selected email's content. ?
  - sph 4y ago
    People do not appreciate good UIs enough. I think many software engineers might be UI-blind, actually. Thunderbird is ugly, atrocious on 4K screens, does not group messages by conversation like mail client have in the past 20 years, and insists on listing emails in side-by-side columns instead of using a more compact and space-effective layout like many mail clients in the past 20 years. It's got a menubar, 3 level of toolbars and a burger menu; unnecessary tabs, cramped spacing, and two search fields. It offers XMPP chat and in-browser junk filtering when the former is pretty much dead, and the second is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition. Someone mentioned LibreOffice elsewhere in the comment, and both projects seems stuck in the 2005 UI, UX and feature wise. I actively avoid using them even if I have to resort to using subpar web applications.
rvz 4y ago
So adding two disasters together makes it magnificent news? Oh dear. I don't think Thunderbird is that relevant today since that it's essentially abandoned and still no Android or iOS app for decades. I'd say that ship has already sailed and it would be a long way to go to support iOS. It has gotten this bad that they needed something like K-9 to have Android support, and you would have thought that even with Google's money they would have already funded an effort like this on their own. Well now lots of Mozilla fans are going to realize that their 'donations' don't actually go to Firefox, or Thunderbird, etc but are really wasted on other schemes. An opportunity thrown away for years and now they come back again with this announcement decades later and coming very late to the party after Thunderbird getting deprioritised. A giant mess.
- dang 4y ago
  Can you please stop posting snarky/fulminatey comments? It's against the site guidelines, and unfortunately nearly everything you've posted recently has this quality. HN is for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    I don't think it's snarky at all. Very frank and forward, sure, but just a persons opinion about two pieces of software and the company that maintains them.
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm talking an entire series of comments, not just this one. The GP was just the place to hang the reply. (The first bit probably does qualify as snark though.)
andrewshadura 4y ago
Can we please have JMAP support in both? Thanks!
8845327 4y ago
Does anyone know how to make gmail play nice with K-9 or FairEmail? Gmail keeps asking me to log in through a browser on my phone, and authorize almost every log in attempt, and not all authorizations are accepted! When I log in into my gmail account on a computer and authorize the "suspect" log ins, gmail still refuses (8/10 times) to allow use through 3rd party apps. My experience with 3rd party email apps has been awful because of this. My conspiracy theory is that google wants to lock users into its ecosystem for continued surveillance/data gathering on users and their usage but I digress. Back to the original issue, wouldn't TB on mobile experience these same issues as K-9/Fairemail?
- brnt 4y ago
  Go to your Google account and setup an app password. Might have to enable 'unsecure' access in additionele (Google think standards bases interfaces are outdated, you see). Then you can add your mail account through IMAP/SMTP, *DAV. As with all things Google, the only winning move is not to play. Long term I'm sure they'll axe this and tell you to use their app or bust.
  - 8845327 4y ago
    agreed that it's best not to use gmail, but boy it is not easy to find a mail service to replace gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc. So far the alternative seems paid protonmail, which I don't mind paying, but how long until they start doing 'funny' things like gmail et al and one has to migrate again.
- forbiddenlake 4y ago
  On FairEmail, GMail via OAuth works fine for me :tm:. On K-9, for now you are going to have to enable 2FA on your google account, then create an app password for K-9 to use. A future version of K-9 will enable OAuth.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I agree with you that Google wants to lock users into their ecosystem. Separetly, i think @brnt is 100% correct; an app password should do the trick for you. Well, at least for now...because @brnt said it best with the following: "...As with all things Google, the only winning move is not to play. Long term I'm sure they'll axe this and tell you to use their app or bust."
danielEM 4y ago
Been waiting and asking for it for years!!! Need this and desktop version of Firefox for Android to be able to use phone for work.
fartcannon 4y ago
I wish companies like Mozilla offered simple email hosting. Something I could use with a custom domain. Cheap, like tutanota.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Most days I'm 50/50 on that approach...On days when i support that, i would be so happy to pay them which would sustain their dev efforts, enable open source to persevere, etc. And, i trust them tons more than other providers. But honestly on other days, it would begin to feel like too many eggs into one basket...maybe not as bad as Microsoft level...even still, whether i would use them or not, i would certainly welcome a world where there would be another, solid (trustworthy) email provider - even if only to give folks an option beyond just Microsoft, Gmail, etc.
bitwize 4y ago
Neat. Something for me to fall back on in case FairEmail guy decides to take his ball and go home again. I've recently started maining Seamonkey as a browser. It has a better UX than all of the big ones -- especially Chrome but even Firefox isn't so great anymore. The Mozilla spinoff projects have lots to recommend them, now that Mozilla is more an outreach organization than a software development organization.
c_prompt 4y ago
Speaking only for myself, I would LOVE to get away from Microsoft Outlook. As I've alluded elsewhere [1], there are some key functions that are needed: - Full encryption integrated into the client for all data (e.g., I don't want Windows Search able to index the mail so someone has access when the client is closed/unencrypted; I also remember testing Thunderbird years ago and was able to go into the individual unencrypted .eml files [I think that's what they were] and read the messages without having Thunderbird opened) - Full local sync with Android/iPhone (i.e., home WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB cable); it still amazes me that Thunderbird still doesn't have this built-in - Xobni-like functionality (e.g., showing all emails and attachments to/from sender when clicking on an email, keyword searches); yes, I know the plugin is still available but it doesn't work properly with current Outlook versions (and no plugin like this exists for Thunderbird) But if the upgraded K-9 also got other integrated Thunderbird functionality (e.g., calendar, contacts, tasks), that would be especially amazing as I could then move away from Google (which I'd also LOVE to do). For example, the Notes field in Google's base Contacts app is limited to 1000 characters. That means I can only sync Outlook to Android one-way (else I lose longer notes when they sync back). To be able to move away from Microsoft and Google to open source... now that's a future worth dreaming about. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31683214#31686186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31683214#31686186
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  After not trying Thunderbird since the '90s (when I dismissed it with prejudice for having no way to export, and thus copy between computers, all the filters you'd set up), I was forced to after discovering the unusably defective shitshow that is Outlook today. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of installing and configuring Thunderbird on two new computers I bought for my parents. Pretty much seamless, and I kept waiting for it to fail it furiously downloaded all 15,000+ messages in each of their AOL In-boxes. Nope. It worked fine, unlike Outlook and whatever the atrocious POS client Microsoft is including with Windows these days.
jesprenj 4y ago
I hope there will be no integration with sponsored providers in K-9. I remember I switched to sylpheed when I figured out Thunderbird was establishing connections to DropBox and promoting it for sharing large files. Perhaps it wasn't DropBox but something else ... Perhaps I'm even making this up (although I don't think so). I've always wanted to know more about this promotion of a filesharing service in Thunderbird, so if anyone knows anything about this, please reply (: AFAIR it was a preinstalled extension on Thunderbird from Debian.
oblib 4y ago
I use Thunderbird on my late `09 Mac Mini. Last week I was testing an html email that uses Bootstrap css for the design layout and it looked great in Thunderbird, Gmail strips any tags for links to css files, and so does Roundcube, so it looked like crap in those. So then I tried embedding the css in the email and same thing. Thunderbird rendered it perfectly and the others ignored and/or removed it. I'm at a loss as to why CSS in an email is ignored or stripped out by Gmail. Sure makes it ugly though.
Qub3d 4y ago
As a user of Thunderbird on desktop and user/donor to K-9 on Android this is incredible news. Super excited to see cketti's work get a major FOSS organization behind it. Contrary to some other comments, I have actually been really happy with the new interface updates and I think giving K-9 a light thunderbird skin would be fantastic.
ycombinator_acc 4y ago
I hope they get rid of the dreaded hamburger menu and other Gingerbread-era design patterns and just generally make the app less ancient-looking and more usable on modern gesture-based Android. Fairemail is much better in that regard, which is why I stick to it, but still quite dated.
- Macha 4y ago
  My one wish for K-9 is swipe-to-archive (or like the fastmail app, swipe to custom selected action). Other than that, while it's generally just... a bit ugly, it functions fine for me.
danShumway 4y ago
I get skeptical about acquisitions, but from what I can tell this actually seems like decent news. Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can increase its development speed and then put their name on it. That seems to me like about the best acquisition goal that they could have -- basically saying, "what exists is good, instead of building our own thing let's just pour resources into what exists." It doesn't seem that conceptually different from what companies do with products like Blender, where sponsoring more development on an existing product is better than rolling an in-house version. The main difference being that K-9 is not independent now, the companies that do this with Blender don't end up owning Blender. So with any acquisition there's some cause for caution, but overall I am inclined to be pretty optimistic about this. I use K-9 today, and I would like to see K-9 get more resources and to get more parity with other clients. I'm a little bit hesitant about my primary email client on my phone entering an experimental phase where its interface is going to change a lot. Again, concerns, but overall this seems like actually pretty good news.
- II2II 4y ago
  If anything, the merger makes Thunderbird more accountable for the future of K-9 than they would be if they sponsored it. It is probable a net positive.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can THunderbird is buying or acquiring K-9? Isn't K-9 FOSS? The OP says only, K-9 Mail officially joins the Thunderbird family (unless I overlooked something).
  - selcuka 4y ago
    It's an acqui-hire. From the announcement: > And cketti [lead dev] has already joined the full-time Thunderbird staff, bringing along his valuable expertise and experience with mobile platforms. [...] To accomplish that, we’ll devote finances and development time to continually improving K-9 Mail.
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L0stLink 4y ago
I would love to see what this will bring to K9 mail. I hope having the support of Thunderbird will allow K9 to really get some much needed polish. My preferred app right now is FairMail, its interface takes some getting used to and settings layout is very confusing but once I did manage to get it setup, it became clear that I preferred its extensive customizability and sidebar vs K9 when it comes to managing emails across multiple accounts. They are basically the only two FLOSS Email apps worth using on android, so K9 getting some extra support is really awesome.
zafiro17 4y ago
I wish both the K9 and Thunderbird teams all the best. K9 needs some love, and so does Thunderbird, honestly. I use Aquamail on Android and love it. Great feature set, works great with multiple accounts, lots of configuration options. It's not open source or free and I honestly do not care. Back in the day it was something like USD 4. Now it's something like USD 25. Still worth it, and I don't mind paying for software if it keeps the developers in business.
dataangel 4y ago
I had no idea thunderbird is still around
ephbit 4y ago
K-9 has served me pretty well over the last 8ish years. It has remained beautifully lightweight (quite an exception for apps nowadays) and the biggest (yet perfectly tolerable) annoyance has been long lines not wrapping automatically. I'm 9/10 sceptic about this cooperation and I'll be positively surprised if the future versions do not introduce lots of unnecessary bloat.
- ephbit 4y ago
  Ah, here it's already announced, the bloat: > Account setup using Thunderbird account auto-configuration. Perfectly unnecessary. > Syncing between desktop and mobile Thunderbird. Duh, what exactly does IMAP do? *shakes head*
  - brnt 4y ago
    Thunderbird auto-config just means a domain lookup in a database though (even better would be that everybody configures .well-known correctly).
  - efreak 4y ago
    IMAP doesn't help if you prefer to read mail offline, after downloading it to your PC and deleting it from the server. There are still ISPs around with mailservers that measure quota in MB; for example, sdf.org offers 25mb free and up to 200mb paid.
XorNot 4y ago
I'm pretty happy about this: K-9 is my daily driver on my phone, and Firefox my web browser. This is a win for the open web.
betwixthewires 4y ago
Looks like it's time to switch to FairEmail. Been K-9 user for a decade, even when development was slow, I love it. Was a Thunderbird user also, meh. It's OK I guess. Now I can look forward to Mozilla's abysmal stewardship and a bunch of senseless UI changes that aren't good UX, just because they're new, and broken workflows. I think I'll pass. I'm sure the maintainer agreed to an acquihire it for good reasons, good on him, but I'm not interested in using Mozilla products anymore.
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Multicomp 4y ago
Not that it matters to most, but as a K9 and Thunderbird user, and a user who often jumps on the complain/concern bandwagon when acquisitions etc. are announced: I'm pleased with this news. Wary of future problems? Sure. But I don't think I could imagine a better set of news for my two favorite email clients. Well. Unless some big moneybags company started investing in DeltaChat. But let's do one pipe dream at a time!
- UberFly 4y ago
  I hadn't heard of DeltaChat but just looked it up. Looks interesting. Thanks for mentioning it.
harry8 4y ago
So this sounds interesting, first I've heard of K9. Installed K9 from f-droid. Stick gmail credentials in. Fails to log on or function. I assume because gmail is actively blocking them. No email notifications of the login attempt from gmail nor android popups. Just silent block. I'm sure there is a reason that makes it all my fault or nothing else that google could possibly do other than that. So let's hear them.
- matt_heimer 4y ago
  Google stopped allowing 3rd party apps to log into your mail account using usernames and passwords on May 30, 2022. https://github.com/thundernest/k-9/issues/6020 https://github.com/thundernest/k-9/issues/6020 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255
  - harry8 4y ago
    Thunderbird logged in on my laptop right now. Blocking 3rd party apps seems relevant to this discussion. Blocking without notifiying as to WHY to make it look like another kind of failure is pretty anti-competitive at best. Bait, "yes we let you use your client with imap" becomes switch "we have enough market share to throw our weight around to hurt the competition" /Me waves to the google employees who found the original post somehow not meeting the guildelines here. Anyway K9 does not work with gmail, apparently since 2 weeks ago. I wonder if joining mozilla 2 weeks after that will change things.
Gentil 4y ago
This is great news for me. I really hope the android version add the RSS reader, calendar and IRC client. Then give an option to link it with the firefox account so as to link the Thunderbird desktop and mobile! Just like it works for firefox now. :mindblown: (Obviously Isolate the email app + calendar portion and the RSS + IRC client part.) That would be a killer app!
lakomen 4y ago
I'll get hate for this, but I have to say it. Thunderbird devs are horribly exclusive and ignorant. Spam is an everyday issue. Every time I use Thunderbird I use "Mark as Junk" and "Delete Mail marked as Junk in Folder". I created an issue asking for buttons for those often used actions instead of having to go to tools, mark, mark as junk. 3 clicks vs 1 button press. It was closed, essentially saying that I'm just one guy and there is no interest in this. This was 10 or more years ago. So excuse me if I'm not very enthusiastic about this. I personally tried K9 but opted for Fairemail, even with it being trialware. A proper email client on Android would very much desired. But then again I would love slypheed or claws. Sylpeed-claws was the best mail client back in the 2000s, much better than Thunderbird imho. We had Gnu/Linux now we have to deal with Android/Linux. Because Google. Why couldn't we just build on Gnu/Linux and have the best "of both worlds", because monetary interests. Bleh.
- eythian 4y ago
  You can click the little flame in the message list column to mark as junk, on mine at least it's between the sender name and the date. Then perhaps have a filter that auto-runs every so often to delete marked items so they vanish on their own.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Did you code a pull request for it?
johntony678 4y ago
[dead]

warabe 4y ago

This is a wonderful news! Finally, k9 mail will come with OAuth functionality!! or won't they?

forbiddenlake 4y ago
Yes; this work was started even before the latest FairEmail kerfluffle, and is slated for K-9 6.200. https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655#issuecomment-1131656000 https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655#issuecomment-113165...

who_is_mr_tux 4y ago

My favorite mobile email app now working with my favorite desktop email app. Love it!

sam_lowry_ 4y ago
It does not support IMAP at first glance. The wizard has only POP3 config option.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  Ah, nope. Manual config has it. I wonder whether IDLE command is supported, but we'll see.

emodendroket 4y ago

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I worry about a loss of focus when Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category on the desktop, which is much less true on mobile.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
The two work in tandem, though. I use Firefox on mobile because I use Firefox on desktop. That and it being the only Android browser that runs uBlock Origin, of course. I currently use Thunderbird on desktop, but use a combination of Gmail and Outlook on Android. If Thunderbird picks up K-9 mail and turns it into a first-class mobile client, I'll probably use Thunderbird instead of the Outlook app. People like consistency.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    Why be so condescending? Also, they could use Firefox on mobile to keep their history and bookmarks in sync across devices in addition to some extensions they find useful, like uBlock Origin as they mentioned. Just because the number of extensions is less than desktop doesn't mean the extensions that do exist aren't game changers for them.
  - pritambaral 4y ago
    Hey, 3 > 0. How many do you enjoy?
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      You missed the good old days of firefox on android supporting hundreds of extensions. progress, I guess?
      - input_sh 4y ago
        Ah yeah, back when page load lasted 3x as long as Chrome (on a lower end device at least). I've installed the rewrite back when it was called Firefox Preview.
    - binarysneaker 4y ago

johntony678 4y ago

[flagged]

sureglymop 4y ago

FairEmail seems a lot more feature filled and better than K9. I think it even tops Desktop Thunderbird.

xcambar 4y ago
Fairemail is worth every penny I've donated to the project and more.
stratom 4y ago
I personally also use FairEmail, but I appreciate that there is an viable opensource alternative.
- zen_1 4y ago
  FairEmail is also open source [1] [1]: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/ https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/
itintheory 4y ago
I thought they were gone after the developer had a fit: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/19/fairemail-developer-calls-it-quits-and-pulls-apps-from-google-play/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/19/fairemail-developer-calls-... but I guess the issue is resolved and they've recanted?
NoGravitas 4y ago
I keep going back and forth between the two. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses the other lacks. Currently, I'm on FairEmail because its IMAP IDLE client implementation seems so much better than K-9's. On the UI side, FairEmail is trying harder to keep up with the Material Treadmill, but still manages to seem less polished.

ekianjo 4y ago

Not thrilled. I use K9 and I don't really want Thunderbird to have anything to do with it :/

prmoustache 4y ago
You realize it is the same developer and can leave thunderbird whenever he is not happy with the direction it takes?
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  Yeah but they cannot take Thunderbird mobile back. Its now Mozilla property, which is the actual scary part.
  - goodusername 4y ago
    Thunderbird mobile will be open source, so they, or anybody else can fork it, and continue development independently of Mozilla, using a different brand. It will not be "Mozilla property".
  - Valmar 4y ago
    They can take it back. Heard of Betterbird? Yeah, a Thunderbird port.

zecg 4y ago

I'll be certain to use whatever fork of K-9 is available rather than anything Mozilla. WHERE'S THE SAVE TO PDF OPTION on mobile Firefox?

prophesi 4y ago
Same way you have to do it on Chrome iOS; Share the page, select print, and zoom in on the thumbnail to have it generate a PDF you can save.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  I don't see that option on mine...But I use Fennec from Fdroid, so maybe that's why.
gnomewascool 4y ago
You'll be happy to know that Thunderbird is for better or worse now mostly independent Mozilla's leadership.
Vladimof 4y ago
The worst thing with Firefox Mobile is that they still force you to use addon collections to use the most basic addons.

CivBase 4y ago

I'm curious how Mozilla feels "Thunderbird on Android" aligns with their mission statement. Thunderbird was practically the de facto alternative to Outlook back when desktop clients were the standard for email. But there have been plenty of quality email clients on Android for a long time. Does buying a popular competitor and re-branding it as Thunderbird really help to "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"? I'm worried this will just end up being another ongoing expense for Mozilla.

warabe 4y ago
There are a lot of "closed source" email clients on Android. I tried to find free, open source email clients, but found only k9 and FairEmail.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I can understand Mozilla wanting to employ someone that works on possibly the most popular Foss email client for android, so as to keep it maintained. That goes in line with their mission statement. The rebrand, I'm sure it's a requirement for the funding, and it makes sense they'd want that. I'm just wary of Mozilla products these days. I'm tired of important tools I use just losing functionality while blog posts pay lip service to power users and internet freedom.

ig-88ms 4y ago

Let's hope K9-Mail gets a more attractive UI. It always felt more clunky than it needed to be.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Have you tried the new 6.000?
mid-kid 4y ago
Its classic android 4 gmail-esque-but-refreshed look is the main reason I use it. It works really well for me, and I kind of miss the primary screen for accounts it used to have, now being delegated to a popout on the sidebar.

OptionX 4y ago

I would normally be wary of such a merger/acquisition, but as a long time user of thunderbird on the desktop this is actually exciting. At least I don't predict K-9 getting worse and has the distinct possibility of getting better and getting more features.

darkwater 4y ago

Oh I was just going to finally configure K9 on my Android to replace the "native" Fastmail client, which sucks A LOT when you don't have internet connection, so this is great news. I really don't understand why it cannot work without internet connection, I'm no Android developer but locally caching the last month / 500MB of messages can't be that complicated.

longrod 4y ago

If there was one product where Mozilla could have really shined, it was Thunderbird. There's nothing like it in the FOSS world. Sadly they deprioritized it over Firefox resulting in the death of both.

javajosh 4y ago

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, its very existence undermines the motivation to start something new. Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler? I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components. An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? And (for office docs) maybe with a more thoughtful file format, like a simple html subset. Does this exist? And if so where do I get it? (And maybe there are better "jumping off points", like VSCode, which is itself a specialization of Electron).

will0 4y ago
Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. (I like electron fwiw, it's enabled me to have a desktop experience with applications that would've otherwise never come to linux)
- javajosh 4y ago
  >Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. Thank you for recognizing this. I admit I had a moment of doubt before pressing "submit". :)
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Keep in mind electron is just one way to go. There's Tauri for example, offering a very similar solution.
- ape4 4y ago
  Email clients need to display full html/css/js now
  - 4y ago

smdotdev 4y ago

imalerba 4y ago

Long time Thunderbird in Linux user, had to switch to Mutt a few months ago. Having 3 inboxes configured was taking, for some reason, +10Gb of disk and several Gb of RAM, plus being painfully slow and freeze pretty often.

alyandon 4y ago
I eventually had to switch off Thunderbird as well for similar reasons and just live with mutt. TB just really didn't perform well at all on large mailboxes (dozens of folders, thousands of messages per folder) without freezing the UI, gobbling gigabytes of ram, etc - it is obviously not targeted at my use case.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
Disk space is as much as you have mail. If not, there is something wrong with your profile. I have 15 GB of mail across 5 email accounts and Thunderbird is currently sitting at 350 MB RAM. Rarely crosses 500MB, I think. I am encountering some freezes and occasional crashes which are annoying, but on linux there is nothing better.
sillystuff 4y ago
With several 10s of thousands of messages (~70 GB) in my accounts, I also had issues with TB using tons of disk space even when set to not copy messages locally. The issue was TB's global search index. If you disable global search indexing in your config, then manually delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file, you can free up those 10+ GB. My fix for most annoyances was to copy mail locally, and run dovecot locally on the same box as TB (TB doesn't support standard maildir). I also added a wrapper script that does a VACUUM on all the sqlite dbs in the profile when starting TB. With the above, TB has worked well for me.
- LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  I didn't realize how many sqlite files there are, I ran "find . -name *.sqlite", I see Chrome related files, cookie files, a file related to storage? Time to look for a new email client which is sad to say after all these years.

xg15 4y ago

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbird team had many discussions on how we might provide a great mobile experience for our users. In the end, we didn’t want to duplicate effort if we could combine forces with an existing open-source project that shared our values. Over years of discussing ways K-9 and Thunderbird could collaborate, we decided it would best serve our users to work together. I don't want to say this is bad for K9, bit I still wonder what will happen to existing K9 installs. If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?

happyopossum 4y ago
> isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.
- xg15 4y ago
  I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    While not commonplace, it's not unheard of for app UI/UXes to be changed completely over an update.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    Is there anything in the announcement that says that people who installed K-9 mail would find that it has silently turned into Thunderbird? I'd assume this would involve a separate install, as it'll probably have a separate app ID indicating the Thunderbird connection. In any case, I've had installed apps have the name change as a part of rebranding before. It's a little bit jarring sometimes, but name changes happen. They're usually small name changes, but I don't thing taking "K-9 mail is continuing development with a new name" as "app becoming something completely different" is really fair. Unless the functionality and UX completely changes, I don't think it's fair to read a name change as something so negative that needs to be "protected against".

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

Hoping it will be on F-Droid...

ThatGeoGuy 4y ago

This is fantastic news all around! I recall the K-9 developer needing additional funding in the past, so this is great news for that project [0]. In addition, I'd much rather use "thunderbird" on mobile as an extension of K9, since it has thus far been my favourite mobile client. Work in the most recent years has been wonderful, and it's a pleasure to use (although I've vastly cut down on mail on mobile because hey, a keyboard is better). Overall, this seems like it makes a lot of sense. Hopefully this will mean that the shift to supporting a mobile client won't detract from the good stuff desktop Thunderbird is doing as well. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131509

pmontra 4y ago

As a Thunderbird and K-9 user this is 51% good news and 49% possibly bad new. Good news because it should increase the chances that the two products will live a longer life. Possibly bad news because I'm one of the crowd that went back to K-9 5.600 because the new version destroyed the UI that was the primary reason why we picked K-9 over other apps. 100% self selection bias here. There was maybe an ongoing effort to offer the old interface as an option. I'm not sure Mozilla's going to invest into that. On the other side, the way I'm using Thunderbird is very close to the old K-9. A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client.

neop1x 4y ago
Same here. I had been a happy K9 user until they redesigned the interface. Putting a message action toolbar on the top for a smartphone app doesn't make any sense. Especially as smartphones are getting taller and taller. I then switched to FairMail. I will re-consider going back if this is fixed.
cookiengineer 4y ago
Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. They abandoned Thunderbird and it's a totally separate community project these days.
- mqus 4y ago
  I probably know less than you, but at least the linked donations page https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/k9mail/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/k9mail/ has heavy mozilla branding and also talks about "Mozilla Thunderbird"... thunderbird.net states at the bottom: Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
  - conradev 4y ago
    Thunderbird operates independently within Mozilla: > There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

btdmaster 4y ago

I really hope this leads to an improvement (reduction) to the stuff Thunderbird pings[0]. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/

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[deleted]

0des 4y ago

Completely off topic, but did anybody spot the actual fed in the comments? Didnt know people just post on random nerd forums trying to sell drugs. That's wild.

aidenn0 4y ago

I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1]. It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are going to be different, it should be to some purpose, but after 6 months of using it I still don't see any purpose. There are still some vestiges of its previous Eudora-like interface, but everywhere it is different from Eudora, it is to no purpose I can fathom. 1: The other two I could find are Evolution and davmail (which bridges EWS to imap). There may be more now; I last looked about a year ago. I can unreservedly say that using Evolution is better experience than Thunderbird, though its underlying architecture is a bit bizarre.

jraph 4y ago
I don't know. I've been using it since 2005. Its UI is stable and efficient. Gets the job done and does not get in the way. And it's free software. You are not actually saying what you don't like about Thunderbird so it's hard to oppose anything to your comment. Why Thunderbird should change its UI if it works okay? Gratuitously different from what by the way? And to me, the UIs of Evolution and KMail don't seem that much different from Thunderbird's and from what I've seem from Outlook, same thing. There's a pane listing inboxes and folders, there's a pane showing the content of the selected folder and there's a pane showing the selected email's content. ?
- sph 4y ago
  People do not appreciate good UIs enough. I think many software engineers might be UI-blind, actually. Thunderbird is ugly, atrocious on 4K screens, does not group messages by conversation like mail client have in the past 20 years, and insists on listing emails in side-by-side columns instead of using a more compact and space-effective layout like many mail clients in the past 20 years. It's got a menubar, 3 level of toolbars and a burger menu; unnecessary tabs, cramped spacing, and two search fields. It offers XMPP chat and in-browser junk filtering when the former is pretty much dead, and the second is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition. Someone mentioned LibreOffice elsewhere in the comment, and both projects seems stuck in the 2005 UI, UX and feature wise. I actively avoid using them even if I have to resort to using subpar web applications.

rvz 4y ago

So adding two disasters together makes it magnificent news? Oh dear. I don't think Thunderbird is that relevant today since that it's essentially abandoned and still no Android or iOS app for decades. I'd say that ship has already sailed and it would be a long way to go to support iOS. It has gotten this bad that they needed something like K-9 to have Android support, and you would have thought that even with Google's money they would have already funded an effort like this on their own. Well now lots of Mozilla fans are going to realize that their 'donations' don't actually go to Firefox, or Thunderbird, etc but are really wasted on other schemes. An opportunity thrown away for years and now they come back again with this announcement decades later and coming very late to the party after Thunderbird getting deprioritised. A giant mess.

dang 4y ago
Can you please stop posting snarky/fulminatey comments? It's against the site guidelines, and unfortunately nearly everything you've posted recently has this quality. HN is for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  I don't think it's snarky at all. Very frank and forward, sure, but just a persons opinion about two pieces of software and the company that maintains them.
  - dang 4y ago
    I'm talking an entire series of comments, not just this one. The GP was just the place to hang the reply. (The first bit probably does qualify as snark though.)

andrewshadura 4y ago

Can we please have JMAP support in both? Thanks!

8845327 4y ago

Does anyone know how to make gmail play nice with K-9 or FairEmail? Gmail keeps asking me to log in through a browser on my phone, and authorize almost every log in attempt, and not all authorizations are accepted! When I log in into my gmail account on a computer and authorize the "suspect" log ins, gmail still refuses (8/10 times) to allow use through 3rd party apps. My experience with 3rd party email apps has been awful because of this. My conspiracy theory is that google wants to lock users into its ecosystem for continued surveillance/data gathering on users and their usage but I digress. Back to the original issue, wouldn't TB on mobile experience these same issues as K-9/Fairemail?

brnt 4y ago
Go to your Google account and setup an app password. Might have to enable 'unsecure' access in additionele (Google think standards bases interfaces are outdated, you see). Then you can add your mail account through IMAP/SMTP, *DAV. As with all things Google, the only winning move is not to play. Long term I'm sure they'll axe this and tell you to use their app or bust.
- 8845327 4y ago
  agreed that it's best not to use gmail, but boy it is not easy to find a mail service to replace gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc. So far the alternative seems paid protonmail, which I don't mind paying, but how long until they start doing 'funny' things like gmail et al and one has to migrate again.
forbiddenlake 4y ago
On FairEmail, GMail via OAuth works fine for me :tm:. On K-9, for now you are going to have to enable 2FA on your google account, then create an app password for K-9 to use. A future version of K-9 will enable OAuth.
mxuribe 4y ago
I agree with you that Google wants to lock users into their ecosystem. Separetly, i think @brnt is 100% correct; an app password should do the trick for you. Well, at least for now...because @brnt said it best with the following: "...As with all things Google, the only winning move is not to play. Long term I'm sure they'll axe this and tell you to use their app or bust."

danielEM 4y ago

Been waiting and asking for it for years!!! Need this and desktop version of Firefox for Android to be able to use phone for work.

fartcannon 4y ago

I wish companies like Mozilla offered simple email hosting. Something I could use with a custom domain. Cheap, like tutanota.

mxuribe 4y ago
Most days I'm 50/50 on that approach...On days when i support that, i would be so happy to pay them which would sustain their dev efforts, enable open source to persevere, etc. And, i trust them tons more than other providers. But honestly on other days, it would begin to feel like too many eggs into one basket...maybe not as bad as Microsoft level...even still, whether i would use them or not, i would certainly welcome a world where there would be another, solid (trustworthy) email provider - even if only to give folks an option beyond just Microsoft, Gmail, etc.

bitwize 4y ago

Neat. Something for me to fall back on in case FairEmail guy decides to take his ball and go home again. I've recently started maining Seamonkey as a browser. It has a better UX than all of the big ones -- especially Chrome but even Firefox isn't so great anymore. The Mozilla spinoff projects have lots to recommend them, now that Mozilla is more an outreach organization than a software development organization.

c_prompt 4y ago

Speaking only for myself, I would LOVE to get away from Microsoft Outlook. As I've alluded elsewhere [1], there are some key functions that are needed: - Full encryption integrated into the client for all data (e.g., I don't want Windows Search able to index the mail so someone has access when the client is closed/unencrypted; I also remember testing Thunderbird years ago and was able to go into the individual unencrypted .eml files [I think that's what they were] and read the messages without having Thunderbird opened) - Full local sync with Android/iPhone (i.e., home WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB cable); it still amazes me that Thunderbird still doesn't have this built-in - Xobni-like functionality (e.g., showing all emails and attachments to/from sender when clicking on an email, keyword searches); yes, I know the plugin is still available but it doesn't work properly with current Outlook versions (and no plugin like this exists for Thunderbird) But if the upgraded K-9 also got other integrated Thunderbird functionality (e.g., calendar, contacts, tasks), that would be especially amazing as I could then move away from Google (which I'd also LOVE to do). For example, the Notes field in Google's base Contacts app is limited to 1000 characters. That means I can only sync Outlook to Android one-way (else I lose longer notes when they sync back). To be able to move away from Microsoft and Google to open source... now that's a future worth dreaming about. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31683214#31686186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31683214#31686186

NonNefarious 4y ago
After not trying Thunderbird since the '90s (when I dismissed it with prejudice for having no way to export, and thus copy between computers, all the filters you'd set up), I was forced to after discovering the unusably defective shitshow that is Outlook today. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of installing and configuring Thunderbird on two new computers I bought for my parents. Pretty much seamless, and I kept waiting for it to fail it furiously downloaded all 15,000+ messages in each of their AOL In-boxes. Nope. It worked fine, unlike Outlook and whatever the atrocious POS client Microsoft is including with Windows these days.

jesprenj 4y ago

I hope there will be no integration with sponsored providers in K-9. I remember I switched to sylpheed when I figured out Thunderbird was establishing connections to DropBox and promoting it for sharing large files. Perhaps it wasn't DropBox but something else ... Perhaps I'm even making this up (although I don't think so). I've always wanted to know more about this promotion of a filesharing service in Thunderbird, so if anyone knows anything about this, please reply (: AFAIR it was a preinstalled extension on Thunderbird from Debian.

oblib 4y ago

I use Thunderbird on my late `09 Mac Mini. Last week I was testing an html email that uses Bootstrap css for the design layout and it looked great in Thunderbird, Gmail strips any tags for links to css files, and so does Roundcube, so it looked like crap in those. So then I tried embedding the css in the email and same thing. Thunderbird rendered it perfectly and the others ignored and/or removed it. I'm at a loss as to why CSS in an email is ignored or stripped out by Gmail. Sure makes it ugly though.

Qub3d 4y ago

As a user of Thunderbird on desktop and user/donor to K-9 on Android this is incredible news. Super excited to see cketti's work get a major FOSS organization behind it. Contrary to some other comments, I have actually been really happy with the new interface updates and I think giving K-9 a light thunderbird skin would be fantastic.

ycombinator_acc 4y ago

I hope they get rid of the dreaded hamburger menu and other Gingerbread-era design patterns and just generally make the app less ancient-looking and more usable on modern gesture-based Android. Fairemail is much better in that regard, which is why I stick to it, but still quite dated.

Macha 4y ago
My one wish for K-9 is swipe-to-archive (or like the fastmail app, swipe to custom selected action). Other than that, while it's generally just... a bit ugly, it functions fine for me.

danShumway 4y ago

I get skeptical about acquisitions, but from what I can tell this actually seems like decent news. Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can increase its development speed and then put their name on it. That seems to me like about the best acquisition goal that they could have -- basically saying, "what exists is good, instead of building our own thing let's just pour resources into what exists." It doesn't seem that conceptually different from what companies do with products like Blender, where sponsoring more development on an existing product is better than rolling an in-house version. The main difference being that K-9 is not independent now, the companies that do this with Blender don't end up owning Blender. So with any acquisition there's some cause for caution, but overall I am inclined to be pretty optimistic about this. I use K-9 today, and I would like to see K-9 get more resources and to get more parity with other clients. I'm a little bit hesitant about my primary email client on my phone entering an experimental phase where its interface is going to change a lot. Again, concerns, but overall this seems like actually pretty good news.

II2II 4y ago
If anything, the merger makes Thunderbird more accountable for the future of K-9 than they would be if they sponsored it. It is probable a net positive.
wolverine876 4y ago
> Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can THunderbird is buying or acquiring K-9? Isn't K-9 FOSS? The OP says only, K-9 Mail officially joins the Thunderbird family (unless I overlooked something).
- selcuka 4y ago
  It's an acqui-hire. From the announcement: > And cketti [lead dev] has already joined the full-time Thunderbird staff, bringing along his valuable expertise and experience with mobile platforms. [...] To accomplish that, we’ll devote finances and development time to continually improving K-9 Mail.

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L0stLink 4y ago

I would love to see what this will bring to K9 mail. I hope having the support of Thunderbird will allow K9 to really get some much needed polish. My preferred app right now is FairMail, its interface takes some getting used to and settings layout is very confusing but once I did manage to get it setup, it became clear that I preferred its extensive customizability and sidebar vs K9 when it comes to managing emails across multiple accounts. They are basically the only two FLOSS Email apps worth using on android, so K9 getting some extra support is really awesome.

zafiro17 4y ago

I wish both the K9 and Thunderbird teams all the best. K9 needs some love, and so does Thunderbird, honestly. I use Aquamail on Android and love it. Great feature set, works great with multiple accounts, lots of configuration options. It's not open source or free and I honestly do not care. Back in the day it was something like USD 4. Now it's something like USD 25. Still worth it, and I don't mind paying for software if it keeps the developers in business.

dataangel 4y ago

I had no idea thunderbird is still around

ephbit 4y ago

K-9 has served me pretty well over the last 8ish years. It has remained beautifully lightweight (quite an exception for apps nowadays) and the biggest (yet perfectly tolerable) annoyance has been long lines not wrapping automatically. I'm 9/10 sceptic about this cooperation and I'll be positively surprised if the future versions do not introduce lots of unnecessary bloat.

ephbit 4y ago
Ah, here it's already announced, the bloat: > Account setup using Thunderbird account auto-configuration. Perfectly unnecessary. > Syncing between desktop and mobile Thunderbird. Duh, what exactly does IMAP do? *shakes head*
- brnt 4y ago
  Thunderbird auto-config just means a domain lookup in a database though (even better would be that everybody configures .well-known correctly).
- efreak 4y ago
  IMAP doesn't help if you prefer to read mail offline, after downloading it to your PC and deleting it from the server. There are still ISPs around with mailservers that measure quota in MB; for example, sdf.org offers 25mb free and up to 200mb paid.

XorNot 4y ago

I'm pretty happy about this: K-9 is my daily driver on my phone, and Firefox my web browser. This is a win for the open web.

betwixthewires 4y ago

Looks like it's time to switch to FairEmail. Been K-9 user for a decade, even when development was slow, I love it. Was a Thunderbird user also, meh. It's OK I guess. Now I can look forward to Mozilla's abysmal stewardship and a bunch of senseless UI changes that aren't good UX, just because they're new, and broken workflows. I think I'll pass. I'm sure the maintainer agreed to an acquihire it for good reasons, good on him, but I'm not interested in using Mozilla products anymore.

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Multicomp 4y ago

Not that it matters to most, but as a K9 and Thunderbird user, and a user who often jumps on the complain/concern bandwagon when acquisitions etc. are announced: I'm pleased with this news. Wary of future problems? Sure. But I don't think I could imagine a better set of news for my two favorite email clients. Well. Unless some big moneybags company started investing in DeltaChat. But let's do one pipe dream at a time!

UberFly 4y ago
I hadn't heard of DeltaChat but just looked it up. Looks interesting. Thanks for mentioning it.

harry8 4y ago

So this sounds interesting, first I've heard of K9. Installed K9 from f-droid. Stick gmail credentials in. Fails to log on or function. I assume because gmail is actively blocking them. No email notifications of the login attempt from gmail nor android popups. Just silent block. I'm sure there is a reason that makes it all my fault or nothing else that google could possibly do other than that. So let's hear them.

matt_heimer 4y ago
Google stopped allowing 3rd party apps to log into your mail account using usernames and passwords on May 30, 2022. https://github.com/thundernest/k-9/issues/6020 https://github.com/thundernest/k-9/issues/6020 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255
- harry8 4y ago
  Thunderbird logged in on my laptop right now. Blocking 3rd party apps seems relevant to this discussion. Blocking without notifiying as to WHY to make it look like another kind of failure is pretty anti-competitive at best. Bait, "yes we let you use your client with imap" becomes switch "we have enough market share to throw our weight around to hurt the competition" /Me waves to the google employees who found the original post somehow not meeting the guildelines here. Anyway K9 does not work with gmail, apparently since 2 weeks ago. I wonder if joining mozilla 2 weeks after that will change things.

Gentil 4y ago

This is great news for me. I really hope the android version add the RSS reader, calendar and IRC client. Then give an option to link it with the firefox account so as to link the Thunderbird desktop and mobile! Just like it works for firefox now. :mindblown: (Obviously Isolate the email app + calendar portion and the RSS + IRC client part.) That would be a killer app!

lakomen 4y ago

I'll get hate for this, but I have to say it. Thunderbird devs are horribly exclusive and ignorant. Spam is an everyday issue. Every time I use Thunderbird I use "Mark as Junk" and "Delete Mail marked as Junk in Folder". I created an issue asking for buttons for those often used actions instead of having to go to tools, mark, mark as junk. 3 clicks vs 1 button press. It was closed, essentially saying that I'm just one guy and there is no interest in this. This was 10 or more years ago. So excuse me if I'm not very enthusiastic about this. I personally tried K9 but opted for Fairemail, even with it being trialware. A proper email client on Android would very much desired. But then again I would love slypheed or claws. Sylpeed-claws was the best mail client back in the 2000s, much better than Thunderbird imho. We had Gnu/Linux now we have to deal with Android/Linux. Because Google. Why couldn't we just build on Gnu/Linux and have the best "of both worlds", because monetary interests. Bleh.

eythian 4y ago
You can click the little flame in the message list column to mark as junk, on mine at least it's between the sender name and the date. Then perhaps have a filter that auto-runs every so often to delete marked items so they vanish on their own.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Did you code a pull request for it?

johntony678 4y ago

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