6 ms·

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

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/
    - folkrav 4y ago
      Still a far ways from having "nothing to do" with it
      - rjzzleep 4y ago
        Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are not the same thing.
        tomcatfish 4y ago
        To clarify, the comment in question was > Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. which fails to claim anything about the Mozilla Foundation or Corporation in particular.
        selcuka 4y ago
        I agree that "nothing to do" is a strong statement but it's neither "Mozilla Foundation" nor "Mozilla Corporation". It's "MZLA Technologies Corporation".
        folkrav 4y ago
        When they announced the split, I seem to remember reading it's setup pretty much the same way as the Mozilla Corporation, so as a corporate subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
        justinclift 4y ago
        But the page literally says: > ... MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
  - password4321 4y ago
    Ha, Firefox should move out too!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- avian 4y ago
  > Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. Mozilla the non-profit owns the for-profit corp who owns Thunderbird. In their own words from the footer of https://www.thunderbird.net https://www.thunderbird.net: > Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
  - cookiengineer 4y ago
    ... which is in conflict with the Thunderbird FAQ [1]: > Who makes Thunderbird? > Thunderbird is developed, tested, translated and supported largely by group of dedicated volunteers, plus paid staff. Thunderbird is an independent, community driven project. Therefore its paid staff, budget and fundraising are entirely managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community. Thunderbird development is made possible by funds donated by the Thunderbird community. (Mozilla Corporation, the makers of Firefox, and Mozilla Messaging no longer develop Thunderbird. But Mozilla still supports Thunderbird by hosting many of the Thunderbird resources.) [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-makes-thunderbird https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-m...
    - bobajeff 4y ago
      I wonder if the future of Firefox is becoming primarily a community driven project. I kind of hope so.
    - jorams 4y ago
      There's no conflict there. Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation are separate entities, Corporation being owned by Foundation. Thunderbird is no longer developed by Corporation. It does still receive support from Foundation.
- dizhn 4y ago
  It's still part of mozilla the company and has a special advantage in that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Though they aren't tax deductible. So I wonder how much they actually get. Having decided to just look while writing this comment, apparently it was a couple million last year? Which doesn't seem bad.
    - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
      Yeah, the 3 million that Thunderbird specifically got in donations last year is absurd. I suspect it’s more than any other user-facing non profit open source application.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    > that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project. I would love to donate to the browser, while my small donation won't make it independent from Google's money it might be a small step towards it. I don't especially mind their political agenda, however that's not what I want to donate to, I have other political orgs I prefer.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  P=P is based on K-9 and had a material design UI long before K-9 had it. Postbox is based on Thunderbird with a more modern UI, but its Windows and macOS only (does work in Wine). I stick with FairEmail on Android for now. Its completely FOSS and in active development.
  - brnt 4y ago
    I've seen P=P (or pEp) and even used it, but I've never heard anyone mention it till now. Visually it's clear its a fork of K9, but you can't find any trace of that on their website or repo (it's self hosted). Seems to be no community around it, while it seems a solid choice, especially if you use openpgp. Have you used it?
    - Fnoord 4y ago
      Sorry for not making it clear. I've used P=P (or actually the correct name is p≡p or pEp) before when FairEmail wasn't existent or in its very early days, and K-9 still did not have material design. I believe the material design got backported to K-9. This was during a time when K-9 didn't get stable releases, and was lacking on development. They also use opportunistic encryption, but I frankly just assume e-mail is insecure communication and live with that thought. I've mentioned the applications (pEp and FairEmail) various times here and elsewhere.
decrypt 4y ago
May I ask what Thunderbird local storage means? Does that mean that emails are delivered and stored on the device, vs on a cloud server?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Yeah, to me, it sounds like a confusion in understanding what IMAP and POP email accounts are and how they work.
- efreak 4y ago
  It sounds like they want k9 to be a client for thunderbird, so when you read email in k9, thunderbird marks it as read; when you fetch email, it goes through thunderbird. Thunderbird would be a caching proxy as well as an email client. If you keep your desktop on 24/7 as many people do, then you might keep your email client (thunderbird) open in the background, checking for mail every 5 minutes so you know when you get new email. Since your storage quota is only 250mb, you delete email from the server automatically on download. Now suppose you want to take an email with you to a community meeting. You can print it out, or you can email it to yourself at a different address. Or if you were able to link up your phone with your computer's storage, you can just search up the email on demand, find related messages, and make changes to drafts for your community mailing list. If you could connect to thunderbird with an IMAP client, then this would be possible.
- pmontra 4y ago
  I don't use IMAP because I don't want to leave my email on my email provider servers. I download messages over POP3, filter to folders (one per person or customer) and backup as any other file. I use K9 to read those messages over POP3 before I download them with Thunderbird. I delete notifications and anything that doesn't have to be stored forever. The obvious downside is that I can't access old mail when I'm away from my laptop (example: now.) Surprisingly this never turned out to be a problem for the last 30 years. Of course I didn't use K9 unless I had an Android phone in 2011. However I see two ways to let my phone read old mail 1. Set up my own IMAP server at home and deliver email to it, then program some filter system to mimic what I'm doing in Thunderbird. 2. Access Thunderbird directory on my laptop over IMAP. That IMAP server would be on my laptop or (better) on some always on server at home that uses the same file format as Thunderbird. I would rsync it with my laptop. I admit that number 2 is weird. Number 1 is the proper way but I have so little incentive to do it that I'll probably stick with my current setup forever.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I actually stopped using K9 because it stuck to the ridiculously outdated, and honestly quite ugly, Holo interface. Holo worked as long as the entire system was consistent, but as soon as material design got fixed in Android 7 (took them a while to cut down on the margins!) I was over Holo. I don't feel like setting up my mail client again but looking at the current design I'm pleasantly surprised. I'll probably give it a go as soon as the Thunderbird team and the K9 team have joined forces for an actual release.
- spopejoy 4y ago
  Agree. TIL that there was this "revolt" against KMail's UI change. It actually made KMail usable with e.g. 5000 mail entries in a folder, whereas before 500 could cause it to lag on scrolling and be unusable at 1000.
- rollcat 4y ago
  How I miss Holo. It was simple, consistent, basic but still elegant. Personally, it was the transition from Holo to Material that drove me off Android entirely. There was no such thing as dark mode at the time Android 5 dropped; you had to set brightness very low to stand a chance at reading anything in the dark, and with many (almost all?) apps still using the dark Holo, looking at and using the device was jarring. I switched to Jolla, and later to iOS. I'm happy Android users didn't have to suffer through another platform-wide redesign in the meantime, but I personally don't find Material appealing.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I think Material done well looks quite attractive. The problem is that very few developers seem to read the Material Design guidelines on offsets and such and the offsets often look cobbled together. Not even Google themselves can consistently follow their own design guidelines. To be fair, as long as I can keep basic features (i.e. an app drawer and placing my icons and widgets wherever I'd like) I'd be fine with a Cupertino styles phone as well, as long as the damn thing is consistent. Back in the Holo days everybody but the game devs followed Holo because it was quite easy to follow, there weren't a lot of subtle details if you used existing components. Looking back at screenshot it looked a bit clunky, but every app looking nearly platform native was a huge plus that we don't seem to get on Android anymore.
Groxx 4y ago
Given how SMS on Android is basically just a database that's shared between all SMS apps... it does seem like there should be an email equivalent. Not having to plug my password into every email app would be a good thing. Or does IMAP cover that sufficiently well, e.g. not requiring duplicating a ton of data? I haven't dug into the spec before, I've just always used it with "download everything all the time" configs, but I know it has remote searching and a few other things that'd fit reasonably well with a content provider.
- tjoff 4y ago
  So that more apps can snoop on your email? Why would you want to use more than one email-app for the same accounts? (I get that you might want to use the gmail app for a gmail account, but then using the same account in K9 doesn't make much sense to me)
  - kroltan 4y ago
    As far as I understand, there is still exclusive access to 1 app at a time, it's just that the accounts and sending/receiving is handled by the OS, and apps call into the OS to do operations, rather than maintaining their own credential stores and talking POP/IMAP/whatever directly to servers.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Not being forced to enter your credentials in android itself is a feature. Back in early android-days many email-apps actually added an android account for IMAP/POP accounts. Which felt quite awkward. And I suspect that it was trivial for any app to list your accounts and get all of your registered email-addresses.
      - Groxx 4y ago
        Yeah, android's "accounts" thing really has not worked out in practice. It always felt half-complete and strange, and it's still a very rough experience. In principle it... might make sense? A system-provided-and-presumably-more-secure login method isn't inherently a bad idea. But without a deeper commitment from them / a better way to actually trust it / more consistent updates from OEMs (lol, yeah right), apps really have ended up generally better and more trustworthy.
jacooper 4y ago
Honestly I'm totally the opposite. I had a very negative impression on k-9 when I tried to use it a long time ago because of it's old interface. However I recently needed an email app, I tried Fairmail but it has so many options, and its UI is very weird. I switched to K-9 and its perfect!, yes its not fully modern looking but its easy to use and simple to get started with. If K-9 stayed with the holo UI I probably wouldn't have used it.
fnord123 4y ago
> A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client Isn't Thunderbird using some weird file based system? Wouldn't an SQLite backed client be a better idea in general? What would the advantage of thunderbirds local storage have aside from maturity?
- mook 4y ago
  The old format was basically "concatenate all mail together in one giant file". I believe newer versions support Maildir ("pretend you're an IMAP server"), partly to support antivirus better (i.e. when things get quarantined under you, hope only the bad message gets moved instead of all your mail). They do have a weird database format ("mork"), but that is for state tracking, address books, etc. and not the actual messages, I believe.
- LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  If Thunderbird moves away from file based I will find a new email client. I already have to deal with the monstrosity that is systemd, don't want my email subjugated to a database. Databases are fine for data. I want my email in files so I can easily move away if needed, to another client.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Yeah, we're sticking with thunderbird in large part for their MBOX support and if they ever dropped it we'd move to something else. MBOX makes it dead simple to parse or grep through your messages.
    - fnord123 4y ago
      But isn't something like SQLite fts (full text search, not full table scan, arf arf) more efficient than grep?
danShumway 4y ago
I'll say that I personally thought the old interface was pretty outdated and clunky, and I regularly wished it could be a bit better. But, I do sympathize. I guess it kind of depends on (sans acquisition) whether that old UI would have actually been offered as an option. If so, then yeah, this is probably bad news for you. If not, then... at least there should be some new features coming out, and maybe the eventual interface they go with won't be quite as generic as the new one. But yeah, I sympathize, I'm just not sure that with any long-term OS project on Android that you'd be able to indefinitely get away with having no interface changes regardless of whether the project gets sold or not. Even though I do think it's reasonable to want to stick with the existing interface.
throwaway67743 4y ago
FairEmail exists, k-9 was fine when nothing else existed but now we'll get a thunderbird (read: trash) branded version that still doesn't do its one job well.
- lakomen 4y ago
  Exactly this

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/
  - folkrav 4y ago
    Still a far ways from having "nothing to do" with it
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are not the same thing.
      - tomcatfish 4y ago
        To clarify, the comment in question was > Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. which fails to claim anything about the Mozilla Foundation or Corporation in particular.
        selcuka 4y ago
        I agree that "nothing to do" is a strong statement but it's neither "Mozilla Foundation" nor "Mozilla Corporation". It's "MZLA Technologies Corporation".
        folkrav 4y ago
        When they announced the split, I seem to remember reading it's setup pretty much the same way as the Mozilla Corporation, so as a corporate subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
        justinclift 4y ago
        But the page literally says: > ... MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
- password4321 4y ago
  Ha, Firefox should move out too!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
avian 4y ago
> Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. Mozilla the non-profit owns the for-profit corp who owns Thunderbird. In their own words from the footer of https://www.thunderbird.net https://www.thunderbird.net: > Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
- cookiengineer 4y ago
  ... which is in conflict with the Thunderbird FAQ [1]: > Who makes Thunderbird? > Thunderbird is developed, tested, translated and supported largely by group of dedicated volunteers, plus paid staff. Thunderbird is an independent, community driven project. Therefore its paid staff, budget and fundraising are entirely managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community. Thunderbird development is made possible by funds donated by the Thunderbird community. (Mozilla Corporation, the makers of Firefox, and Mozilla Messaging no longer develop Thunderbird. But Mozilla still supports Thunderbird by hosting many of the Thunderbird resources.) [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-makes-thunderbird https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-m...
  - bobajeff 4y ago
    I wonder if the future of Firefox is becoming primarily a community driven project. I kind of hope so.
  - jorams 4y ago
    There's no conflict there. Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation are separate entities, Corporation being owned by Foundation. Thunderbird is no longer developed by Corporation. It does still receive support from Foundation.
dizhn 4y ago
It's still part of mozilla the company and has a special advantage in that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  Though they aren't tax deductible. So I wonder how much they actually get. Having decided to just look while writing this comment, apparently it was a couple million last year? Which doesn't seem bad.
  - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
    Yeah, the 3 million that Thunderbird specifically got in donations last year is absurd. I suspect it’s more than any other user-facing non profit open source application.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  > that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project. I would love to donate to the browser, while my small donation won't make it independent from Google's money it might be a small step towards it. I don't especially mind their political agenda, however that's not what I want to donate to, I have other political orgs I prefer.
Fnoord 4y ago
P=P is based on K-9 and had a material design UI long before K-9 had it. Postbox is based on Thunderbird with a more modern UI, but its Windows and macOS only (does work in Wine). I stick with FairEmail on Android for now. Its completely FOSS and in active development.
- brnt 4y ago
  I've seen P=P (or pEp) and even used it, but I've never heard anyone mention it till now. Visually it's clear its a fork of K9, but you can't find any trace of that on their website or repo (it's self hosted). Seems to be no community around it, while it seems a solid choice, especially if you use openpgp. Have you used it?
  - Fnoord 4y ago
    Sorry for not making it clear. I've used P=P (or actually the correct name is p≡p or pEp) before when FairEmail wasn't existent or in its very early days, and K-9 still did not have material design. I believe the material design got backported to K-9. This was during a time when K-9 didn't get stable releases, and was lacking on development. They also use opportunistic encryption, but I frankly just assume e-mail is insecure communication and live with that thought. I've mentioned the applications (pEp and FairEmail) various times here and elsewhere.

decrypt 4y ago

May I ask what Thunderbird local storage means? Does that mean that emails are delivered and stored on the device, vs on a cloud server?

dylan604 4y ago
Yeah, to me, it sounds like a confusion in understanding what IMAP and POP email accounts are and how they work.
efreak 4y ago
It sounds like they want k9 to be a client for thunderbird, so when you read email in k9, thunderbird marks it as read; when you fetch email, it goes through thunderbird. Thunderbird would be a caching proxy as well as an email client. If you keep your desktop on 24/7 as many people do, then you might keep your email client (thunderbird) open in the background, checking for mail every 5 minutes so you know when you get new email. Since your storage quota is only 250mb, you delete email from the server automatically on download. Now suppose you want to take an email with you to a community meeting. You can print it out, or you can email it to yourself at a different address. Or if you were able to link up your phone with your computer's storage, you can just search up the email on demand, find related messages, and make changes to drafts for your community mailing list. If you could connect to thunderbird with an IMAP client, then this would be possible.
pmontra 4y ago
I don't use IMAP because I don't want to leave my email on my email provider servers. I download messages over POP3, filter to folders (one per person or customer) and backup as any other file. I use K9 to read those messages over POP3 before I download them with Thunderbird. I delete notifications and anything that doesn't have to be stored forever. The obvious downside is that I can't access old mail when I'm away from my laptop (example: now.) Surprisingly this never turned out to be a problem for the last 30 years. Of course I didn't use K9 unless I had an Android phone in 2011. However I see two ways to let my phone read old mail 1. Set up my own IMAP server at home and deliver email to it, then program some filter system to mimic what I'm doing in Thunderbird. 2. Access Thunderbird directory on my laptop over IMAP. That IMAP server would be on my laptop or (better) on some always on server at home that uses the same file format as Thunderbird. I would rsync it with my laptop. I admit that number 2 is weird. Number 1 is the proper way but I have so little incentive to do it that I'll probably stick with my current setup forever.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I actually stopped using K9 because it stuck to the ridiculously outdated, and honestly quite ugly, Holo interface. Holo worked as long as the entire system was consistent, but as soon as material design got fixed in Android 7 (took them a while to cut down on the margins!) I was over Holo. I don't feel like setting up my mail client again but looking at the current design I'm pleasantly surprised. I'll probably give it a go as soon as the Thunderbird team and the K9 team have joined forces for an actual release.

spopejoy 4y ago
Agree. TIL that there was this "revolt" against KMail's UI change. It actually made KMail usable with e.g. 5000 mail entries in a folder, whereas before 500 could cause it to lag on scrolling and be unusable at 1000.
rollcat 4y ago
How I miss Holo. It was simple, consistent, basic but still elegant. Personally, it was the transition from Holo to Material that drove me off Android entirely. There was no such thing as dark mode at the time Android 5 dropped; you had to set brightness very low to stand a chance at reading anything in the dark, and with many (almost all?) apps still using the dark Holo, looking at and using the device was jarring. I switched to Jolla, and later to iOS. I'm happy Android users didn't have to suffer through another platform-wide redesign in the meantime, but I personally don't find Material appealing.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I think Material done well looks quite attractive. The problem is that very few developers seem to read the Material Design guidelines on offsets and such and the offsets often look cobbled together. Not even Google themselves can consistently follow their own design guidelines. To be fair, as long as I can keep basic features (i.e. an app drawer and placing my icons and widgets wherever I'd like) I'd be fine with a Cupertino styles phone as well, as long as the damn thing is consistent. Back in the Holo days everybody but the game devs followed Holo because it was quite easy to follow, there weren't a lot of subtle details if you used existing components. Looking back at screenshot it looked a bit clunky, but every app looking nearly platform native was a huge plus that we don't seem to get on Android anymore.

Groxx 4y ago

Given how SMS on Android is basically just a database that's shared between all SMS apps... it does seem like there should be an email equivalent. Not having to plug my password into every email app would be a good thing. Or does IMAP cover that sufficiently well, e.g. not requiring duplicating a ton of data? I haven't dug into the spec before, I've just always used it with "download everything all the time" configs, but I know it has remote searching and a few other things that'd fit reasonably well with a content provider.

tjoff 4y ago
So that more apps can snoop on your email? Why would you want to use more than one email-app for the same accounts? (I get that you might want to use the gmail app for a gmail account, but then using the same account in K9 doesn't make much sense to me)
- kroltan 4y ago
  As far as I understand, there is still exclusive access to 1 app at a time, it's just that the accounts and sending/receiving is handled by the OS, and apps call into the OS to do operations, rather than maintaining their own credential stores and talking POP/IMAP/whatever directly to servers.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    Not being forced to enter your credentials in android itself is a feature. Back in early android-days many email-apps actually added an android account for IMAP/POP accounts. Which felt quite awkward. And I suspect that it was trivial for any app to list your accounts and get all of your registered email-addresses.
    - Groxx 4y ago
      Yeah, android's "accounts" thing really has not worked out in practice. It always felt half-complete and strange, and it's still a very rough experience. In principle it... might make sense? A system-provided-and-presumably-more-secure login method isn't inherently a bad idea. But without a deeper commitment from them / a better way to actually trust it / more consistent updates from OEMs (lol, yeah right), apps really have ended up generally better and more trustworthy.

jacooper 4y ago

Honestly I'm totally the opposite. I had a very negative impression on k-9 when I tried to use it a long time ago because of it's old interface. However I recently needed an email app, I tried Fairmail but it has so many options, and its UI is very weird. I switched to K-9 and its perfect!, yes its not fully modern looking but its easy to use and simple to get started with. If K-9 stayed with the holo UI I probably wouldn't have used it.

fnord123 4y ago

> A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client Isn't Thunderbird using some weird file based system? Wouldn't an SQLite backed client be a better idea in general? What would the advantage of thunderbirds local storage have aside from maturity?

mook 4y ago
The old format was basically "concatenate all mail together in one giant file". I believe newer versions support Maildir ("pretend you're an IMAP server"), partly to support antivirus better (i.e. when things get quarantined under you, hope only the bad message gets moved instead of all your mail). They do have a weird database format ("mork"), but that is for state tracking, address books, etc. and not the actual messages, I believe.
LoveGracePeace 4y ago
If Thunderbird moves away from file based I will find a new email client. I already have to deal with the monstrosity that is systemd, don't want my email subjugated to a database. Databases are fine for data. I want my email in files so I can easily move away if needed, to another client.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Yeah, we're sticking with thunderbird in large part for their MBOX support and if they ever dropped it we'd move to something else. MBOX makes it dead simple to parse or grep through your messages.
  - fnord123 4y ago
    But isn't something like SQLite fts (full text search, not full table scan, arf arf) more efficient than grep?

danShumway 4y ago

I'll say that I personally thought the old interface was pretty outdated and clunky, and I regularly wished it could be a bit better. But, I do sympathize. I guess it kind of depends on (sans acquisition) whether that old UI would have actually been offered as an option. If so, then yeah, this is probably bad news for you. If not, then... at least there should be some new features coming out, and maybe the eventual interface they go with won't be quite as generic as the new one. But yeah, I sympathize, I'm just not sure that with any long-term OS project on Android that you'd be able to indefinitely get away with having no interface changes regardless of whether the project gets sold or not. Even though I do think it's reasonable to want to stick with the existing interface.

throwaway67743 4y ago

FairEmail exists, k-9 was fine when nothing else existed but now we'll get a thunderbird (read: trash) branded version that still doesn't do its one job well.

lakomen 4y ago
Exactly this