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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
People would be wise to look into the incredible amount of criticism thrown at K-9 in the last two years over the recent UI design changes.
I personally see this as a way for cketti to get acqui-hired and maybe get away from K-9 Mail. The amount of hate directed towards him from the userbase (mostly justified, sorry to say) has been substantial and I can't imagine he really wants to continue dealing with that.
Hopefully Thunderbird will do another UI redesign and fix the mess that was made. I ditched K-9 after the new design came out two years ago.
That's really strange. I think the UX improvements were fantastic.
Given that KMail is really the only true open-source non-janky Android email client it's incredible to me that people can be so uncharitable.
With the UX changes came long-desired fixes. KMail may be the only O/S mail client at this point with a fully working IMAP search (after Apple Mail screwed it up years ago). Plus they fixed a super-irritating power mgmt issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I probably know less than you, but at least the linked donations page 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.
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
I agree that "nothing to do" is a strong statement but it's neither "Mozilla Foundation" nor "Mozilla Corporation". It's "MZLA Technologies Corporation".
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.
... 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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
Content providers can require app signatures, approval, whatever they want. So... no? Unless you build something that allows everyone to read your email. But don't build that if you don't want that.
As far as "why": why not? Some apps do some things better than others. You can already do this with IMAP, it'd just be deduplicating the download cost / connections / etc, which is generally a good thing for mobile use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another option, hypothetical, is you export your emails to a common format like markdown (with embedded meta directly in each file; 1 per email or in a pair where the secondary file is the same name but stores meta only ie- in json) and then open them in any note-taking app or wiki or static site generator that works on markdown files (with some extent of configuration presumably, extra points if the app makes it sensible to easily organize your emails for optimal viewing). You could serve the files over HTTP, probably less hassle than running a secondary IMAP server, or alternatively you could sync them to your device(s) over ssh via git or zfs or an app like Syncthing.
Thunderbird to HTTP looks simple enough to be a side project sometimes in the future. It could integrate with a backup server I'm planning to setup. Thanks.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.
The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
This is great. I am glad K9 will live on. I didn't think it wouldn't anyway because frankly K9 is established software and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything in that space. It wouldn't make sense to kill it and redo it. This is not Microsoft after all, which would take the product and cripple it so much that it has one third the features and the Microsoft name.
However this particular deal sounds a lot like white labeling, don't you think ? :)
Hi Ryan, nice seeing you here. If you don't mind, would love to hear your thoughts:
I’m missing a story about mobile Linux. Has this been discussed; is this something on the roadmap?
There are already excellent e-mail options for iOS. Right now there is almost nothing outside of the cli that’s usable on mobile Linux. Thunderbird would have a chance of being the main choice while helping adoption of mobile Linux in the medium-to long-term.
I understand it’s not realistic to expect anything anytime soon, but I do hope this is being discussed and that we will see a strategy for it.
Have you tried Geary on mobile Linux? I haven't (no pinephone or similar), so I'm sincerely asking. It works well in a very narrow window on desktop Linux, so that seems hopeful? I wonder if it's excessively memory hungry or syncs mail inefficiently, though.
If anyone wants a free pinephone + will use it for something useful (and is prepared to pay the postage from Melbourne, Australia), then they're welcome to mine.
I bought one a few months ago to support the project but never ended up using it. It's still sitting in a drawer.
Realistically, there's no hope I'll ever do anything with it myself. ;)
Sounds great, if no takers yet! I’ve been meaning to do some PostMarketOS dev and it’s one of the primary supported devices. I’m at the other end of the world though, so if someone closer is interested that’d make more sense! Mail is in profile.
It's the most viable and promising so far I think. I have too many directories for it to be usable without some new features, though (namely highlight dirs with new mail and more filtering capabilities). It's practically unusable, but granted I may have an unusual setup. If you just have a handful of active folders it might be great.
Didn't notice any surprising syncing issues so far.
If anyone is getting a sense of deja vu, it's because this is was Outlook mobile strategy. Microsoft acquired a popular third-party Exchange mail client for iOS/Android, named Acompli, and rebranded it to Outlook.
>We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components.
So sayeth every acquiring company about the acquired. I can think of very few that it held true. Maybe this can be added to the list, but only time will tell. I wouldn't suggest people holding their breath though
>These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.
Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.
Just take care that K-9 development doesn't get bogged down in well meant feature ports/unifications that end up being negative value for anyone who isn't fully committed to running their entire life through Thunderbird and K-9, in the most synchronized way. For example the not really in scope but also not really out of scope nature of calendar in Thunderbird should better not spread to K-9 I think (as someone who has never used K-9, but is on Thunderbird since Communicator 4). But if you succeed avoiding that pitfall, if it's really just "we would love to do something on mobile, but we would hate to steal attention from K-9", then it's certainly just applaudable lack of NIH, nice!
Thanks to both you and KMail team. This merger makes tons of sense as both clients made it through some dark years and have both come out on top with amazing improvements. I'm really excited to see what the combined team delivers!
So if it won't change, what is the point of this? I get that Thunderbird (Mozilla corp) wants a mobile client, but if its just the same horrible app with a rebrand, what does it actually offer (since desktop thunderbird is still pretty awful and recently has got to the point where gmail is preferable)?
> It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned
Nothing in this world is purely altruistic. If it didn't make business sense, this wouldn't be happening. Please surprise me and stay true to your word on this.
> The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way. Even if true, please understand why your words are perceived this way.
What business sense do you have in mind? Thunderbird is funded by donations and governed by volunteers. Even if this were some kind of money grab, who's grabbing what money?
Isn't the business reason that they would rather acquire an existing mail app that is similar to what they had in mind rather than building a brand new one themselves?
From Mozilla's previous attempts to jettison Thunderbird, and the period where the community kept it maintained while Mozilla allocated no resources, the relationship between Thunderbird and Mozilla these days is more akin to that between something like GNU or ASF and their projects than a company and its direct project.
While yes Mozilla could theoretically enforce its trademarks and appoint its own team to start making more direct decisions, we've seen how that goes with various ex-GNU projects like libreboot or ASF projects where they don't have the community like OpenOffice
> 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?
On my phone currently, this applies to the following apps:
* Element
* Free Now (European taxi app bought out by BMW/Daimler, formerly mytaxi, formerly hailo)
* Google Hangouts (Was installed as Talk)
* WhatsApp (now Facebook owned)
* A local cinema chain bought out by a UK + Ireland chain
Element did not change ownership. They've just had a few confusing name changes. And the (same) people behind the client are trying to commercialise the client but not the network behind it where your data actually is.
I never understood why they dropped vector as a name. It wasn't a worse name than element. Riot was a terrible name choice however. Sooner or later it would have got caught up being used by people coordinating a protest or something and the press would have had a field day with it.
But your data has never left the matrix network or your own home server if you chose to have one.
RiotX? I don't remember that. There was a TelegramX, maybe this is what you mean? However there was a couple years that I didn't use it much so perhaps I missed it.
But it did go from Vector -> Riot -> Element and various UI and branding changes along the way yes :) Part of this is also that the app was not really "finished" back in the Vector days. It only really came into its own during the Riot age. For example E2E encryption didn't yet exist at the start, and the underlying support in Matrix was missing as well. It's still a protocol and toolset that's evolving rapidly.
However the benefit of Matrix is that you can choose any client you want, there are several for mobiles.
The app that is now the Element Android app co-existed with the old Riot app for over a year as "RiotX". The rebrand and app changeover were timed together, so they renamed the RiotX app to the Element app and replaced the old Riot app with it in one go.
RiotX existed as an experimental client alongside the original Riot, the intention was always to replace Riot with RiotX and this was made very clear (The original java implementation sucked, although what has become Element still has its many many problems)
> 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?
> Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called “Meet Original,” and eventually deprecated.
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.
I've just learned (one benefit of not automatically updating everything) that the app I've used for syncing music from iTunes to my Android phone [1] plus the associated music player app have been sold to some unscrupulous developers who have apparently proceeded to immediately re-add ads into the paid-for (!) versions, re-adding the the file sync limits that originally only applied to the free trial version and things like that and (instead of the former one-time purchase) are now demanding something on the order of 30 $ or so per month (!!) in order to unlock the former paid-for features again.
It'd be nice if there actually was a rule against something like that…
[1] The key features for why I didn't just use a simple file sync was that it supported bi-directional syncing of play counts, ratings and for podcasts also the playback position.
Is it iSyncr + Rocket Player? I am in the same boat if so. Have the paid versions and don't see ads at the moment, but the "Rate Me" popups are a bad sign.
Good guess, yes. :-) From a brief look it seems that these days (I don't think it was around when I first looked a few years ago) MusicBee instead of iTunes on desktop and GoneMAD Music Player might work as a similar combo with bi-directional play count and ratings sync (although I've found somebody saying that this didn't actually work on a latest Android version [1], so hmm...), but it seems the podcasts handling might not work as it currently does.
The problem is that while I don't need the podcasts syncing for regular podcasts (for which a separate podcasts app on my phone would be perfectly fine, and besides I don't listen all that much to podcasts that way anyway), I'm also managing my collection of radio comedies I've scrounged together from all sorts of places as podcasts in iTunes (by simply manually setting the media type to "Podcast" – luckily on Windows, where iTunes hasn't been split up into its components this is still possible), so that
a) they're all together in one place and not cluttering up the music part of my library
b) especially to get the nice at-a-glance listened/not listened/partially listened display, and
c) while iTunes allows setting the "Remember my playback position" for any kind of file, Rocket Player apparently supports remembering the playback position only for podcasts
I've got no idea how GoneMAD and MusicBee's file syncing behave in that regard, but a quick test installation of MusicBee showed that while I could get used to it as an iTunes-replacement for my general music library, it doesn't allow manually importing files as podcasts, meaning I'd have to resort either manually hacking the database, or setting up some sort of fake Podcast running on a local HTTP server in order to import new episodes... :-/
At least for now the old versions will keep working, and if some future Android version does break things, I guess I'll decide what to do about it in terms of a replacement at that time and not now…
Though I guess it does mean that my personal main bug in iSyncr [2] won't ever get fixed now, so maybe I need to resort to APK hacking after all…
[1] Which is how I found out about iSyncr + Rocket Player having been sold in the first place.
[2] After a file has been synced, it won't be synced again if any subsequent changes that don't change either of title/artist/album (or possibly file size, but due to metadata padding small metadata changes won't necessarily change the total file size) happen within 24 hours [3] of the original sync.
[3] I think this is trying to work around the fact that Android reports the file timestamps in local time, so due to either travel or even just summer/winter time a file might suddenly appear as outdated as compared to the last modified timestamp on the desktop. As my desktop with my music library, is in a fixed location, for me 24 hours is excessive, though, and 1 hour to cater for summer/winter time would be enough.
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".
They probably will provide message written in "big friendly letters" on a welcome screen at some point where it will be explained that K9 becomes Thunderbird, and how great that is for you as the user. Either they'll update the client or ask users to download new one and migrate - not sure how that happens on Android.
Will that help? Not sure. Mozilla seems to have weird goals nowadays.
Anyway, I'm so fed up with empty terms like "experiences" and "excitement" all around in IT. But guess that's what happens when you let marketing dictate way too many things in software development.
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.
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.
Users can only easily install extensions from the "recommended" collection. Installing anything else requires running a development build and jumping through hoops. The Firefox team has been very clear that simply developing a reasonable working extension that some people might want does not create an expectation it will ever be recommended.
So why would anybody bother writing an extension for Firefox mobile?
There are already plenty of tab managers that work on desktop, and they shouldn't require a rewrite to work on mobile. I think Mozilla just hasn't finished making Firefox mobile support all the web extension APIs yet, so that's why they haven't opened the mobile app up for installing arbitrary extensions
Yeah, me too. My best guess is that it's PM's who are overprotective of their idea of how it should work and feel they don't have to open the box as wide as on desktop.
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.
Even if Firefox for Android had only one extension (uBlock Origin), I'd still use it. Using an ad blocker is the single best thing you can do to improve your user experience on the web.
Works great! That's three more than Chrome supports.
Plus, I'm at two now. Your post reminded me to check how many add-ons I actually have installed, and I realized that HTTPS Everywhere is no longer needed because Firefox itself rolled out an HTTPS-Only setting.
uBlock by itself is enough to justify using Firefox on Android. Still sucks that they made it so limited, sure, but Mozilla's really good at nailing "somehow the least awful awful browser".
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.
Long time Android Firefox user here, mainly because of Ublock. Syncing with my Mozilla account was a plus, I use Firefox on desktop because of its container tabs. Lately I switched to Brave (Android), which is noticeably faster, and supports extensions too.
Most of the recommended extensions on Firefox Mobile are also the most widely used and most needed (in particular uBlock Origin). But if you really need more extensions, you can jump through a bunch of hoops in Firefox Nightly to get any extension you want. Some of them even work pretty well (I use Privacy Redirect, Stylus, and Bypass Paywalls Clean in addition to some of the recommended ones).
Firefox is a dying horse on its last throes before Hades claims it for its own. Mythology aside, I find it truly sad to see the state Firefox is in. A browser is an incredibly complex piece of software and what Mozilla did with Firefox is nothing short of brilliant. Alas, they have been left too far behind [0] I am afraid they'll no longer be relevant in a few years.
Every few months Mozilla tries to overhaul it's UI and succeeds only to try again later. What are they trying to do? What's the real reason behind their slow descent into irrelevance?
Last time I tried Firefox on Android, it was a mess. Crashing every few minutes, unpredictable. I hear its a lot better now which is great! But why did they ditch the old one?
I'm not sure which Firefox you're using, but the description you've laid out here doesn't match my experience at all. I've been using FF on desktop and android for years and have had no issues whatsoever. In what way do you feel firefox has been "left too far behind" ?
There was a time when Chrome was faster by an ample margin, but it's no longer enough to be an important distinction. Between the privacy respecting features, and plugin support on mobile - Firefox is the best choice.
I don't think this proves Firefox is dying. A better indicator would be Chrome's past decade of 90%+ browser market share. It's also worth noting that a good amount of the features not implemented in Firefox are either Chrome-specific experiments, or features purposefully unimplemented for privacy purposes.
If anything, it shows the damage of a browser-tech monopoly which Edge and Brave aren't helping with.
I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive. Chrome's huge market share is the very reason Firefox isn't trying very hard here. They are playing catch up. Take Manifest v3 for example; Chrome introduced it quite a while ago and made it mandatory for new extensions in 2022. Firefox just started catching up.
This is bad for Firefox because developers will eventually (and some still do) will simply stop supporting Firefox due it being so slow to catch up. Chrome already has such a huge market that a lot of web devs already don't care (e.g. Microsoft Teams).
What does this signify? It's the death of Firefox unless Firefox pulls a miracle here. Chrome is leading, all the devs are following, and they leading by leaps and bounds. Firefox is forced to catch up which causes frustration among users.
How long before Firefox gets tired of playing catch up and simply becomes irrelevant?
I am not happy about this. This is clearly bad but inevitable. The only other real competitor is WebKit which is restricted to Apple only. A huge market still. But Google's monopoly over the browsing market will only cause harm in the long run. Even though it will make devs jobs a lot easier.
> I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive.
Coincidentally, Brave believes they are privacy-invasive and don't support those features either (last paragraph in the article)[0].
Firefox, as with all other browsers aside from Safari, will remain with less than 5% market share for the foreseeable future. But I'd much rather continue supporting different browser engines than use a skinned Chromium to uphold the status quo.
You are misinformed. Firefox had their own implementations of WebUSB and WebBluetooth years and years ago -- they were necessary for FirefoxOS. Deprecating and removing them was a conscious decision because the privacy risks were deemed too great. This is also the case for Manifest v3; Mozilla is trying to determine the 'safe' (i.e. user-friendly) characteristics to implement and ways to mitigate the rest. Some parts of v3 directly conflict with Firefox architecture. As an example, v3 requires service workers, while Firefox permits entirely disabling them.
The overarching theme of your writing on this topic is that Chrome can just spit out Web 'features' at random and unless Firefox implements all of them immediately it is dying. I hope you can try to understand that not only is this not an accurate assessment, but maybe also that Firefox has value beyond being a copy of Chrome.
The security model used in Firefox OS to gate access to these APIs was very different. We never exposed these web bluetooth to the web at large, only to signed apps.
Mozilla needs to step up and find ways to expose such APIs though, because they are useful. Just saying "no" without proposing a solution is a sure way to lose. There's a bit of hope recently with the implementation of WebMIDI in Gecko.
Brave is a way better choice. As for plugin support on mobile, yes that's missing but I use extensions mainly on desktop. Brave comes with an adblocker built in and if that doesn't work, you could use something like Adguard.
There are basically two good, actively developed FOSS email apps for Android: K-9 and FairEmail. Development of FairEmail almost ceased recently, as the developer was having issues with Google Play and no longer felt it was worth his time to work on the app. Thankfully he ultimately decided to continue development. I remember last year there was also a big campaign to get more donations for K-9 as the developers badly needed more resources to continue development.
The category of FOSS email apps may not be dying, but it is small, and never far away from death. Having a large, established project with decent resources backing K-9 is definitely a good thing for the health of the category IMO. Personally I use FairEmail and hope that it will continue to thrive as well.
> Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category
I reluctantly agree. I think that the continuing relevance of email is largely a consequence of open standards and interoperability - things that Google et al are getting less and less keen on. As well as Thunderbird allowing me to have a copy of my emails on my desktop/laptop, rather than in someone's cloud, I think its good to have an open-standard success story to point to.
But in reality I use the Fastmail web client on desktop and Fastmail's app on my Android devices. Despite using Thunderbird for over a decade, nowadays I really only use it to sync a local email archive. I wish it were otherwise.
its mostly dying because its so poorly optimized it chokes on mailboxes that have more than hundred emails and cant do search properly. One of the worst FOSS out there.
Hacker News users are much more likely to have vast email archives organized into folders which must be regularly searched than the general public. Most people have no choice regarding work email. Web email clients and the default mobile clients meet most people's personal email requirements. In other words 3rd party email clients are dying because there is a lack of demand.
Not GUI per se but there's mutt that has high performance. That's why GUI clients are not popular anymore either, because they perform very, very poorly.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
I don't personally find Thunderbird to be bloated, especially compared to e.g. KMail (which even a few years ago was still buggy and unstable for me). "Complex" might be reasonable but I expect a lot of that comes from email protocols themselves being convoluted and weird. In fact, I think email's own complexities are what destroy most peoples' motivation to make a shinier, more modern tool.
I will say I do have a massive, single gripe about Thunderbird, and while it's a trivial thing it's also - and in part because it would be so easy to fix - massively infuriating: the default keybindings for archiving, deleting, marking read emails etc. are, astonishingly, single characters. I've lost count how many times I didn't correctly highlight the filter textbox and started to type a search query, which instead had the effect of randomly archiving, deleting and marking read the top N emails in my inbox before I notice. This is literally why we have control characters, so I find it incredible that this is not only the default behaviour but unchangeable without a plugin [1]. I still find the tool very useful in every other way but I can't believe something so obviously wrong has not yet been fixed after what must be at least 20 years of this software tool being available.
Same (edit: no permanent damage done yet but now I keep tbird minimised to prevent this kind of bad stuff from keybindings).
And I went back to webmail for 6 weeks because when tbird upgraded itself, the new OAuth (I think) stuff needed cookies, which I didn't allow so just couldn't connect and just kept failing without any explanation. That took half a day of chasing down.
And if I get a calendar invite it just tells me "all calendars are currently disabled. Enable an existing calendar or add a new one..." without 1) saying why or 2) saying how (and why would it not just use the one it's literally showing me while saying they're disabled).
And it doesn't recognise domains correctly, and it strips out inline attachments (yes, really), and fucks up formatting (turns html mails into messed up plain text), and it's caused me so much grief since its install, can anyone suggest a competent, reliable email client that has a focus on quality and not a focus on stupid UI crap that makes it feel like someone's personal side-project. I'd gladly pay .
> 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?
As a user, I'd prefer a minimalist office suite that still doesn't have the browser as a starting point.
I think a browser is actually not a good UI for an office programs, because it really awkwardly competes with your own document model: HTML at its core still wants to be a document, except probably not the document you want to have. So you have to reimplement document APIs on top of already existing document APIs.
E.g., tracking and working with selected text is extremely important in office programs, but a browser already has built-in management of text selections: Except, the built-in management doesn't know which part is your chrome and which is your document, making you to either implement your own selection mechanism in addition to the browser's or handle all kinds of really weird special cases.
It is interesting how people serious about text editing always seem to end up throwing away most of the DOM and use Canvas or SVG (e.g. CodeMirror). But even then the browser brings a lot to the table in terms of a common runtime.
It brings a runtime that's easy to distribute to, that's pretty much it. I think there are plenty of runtimes out there (e.g. Java Web Start + JavaFX) that are just as good if not better, but they don't have anything like the same installed base (especially in locked-down corporate environments where you can't just distribute your thing bundled as an executable, which is where a preinstalled runtime really matters) as the browser.
> 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?
As far as email clients go, Thunderbird is literally what you are suggesting. Thunderbird is essentially the Firefox web browser, with all of the browser front-end code stripped off, and an email client dropped in its place.
> Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients,
FWIW, my email life improved massively when I left the likes of Thunderbird and KMail behind for the simplicity of mu/mu4e [1]. I hear similarly stellar things about Notmuch [2]. I'm never going back to an email client that even thinks about itself in relation to "office suites".
(For casual reading, and very rare composing, on a phone, k9 works passably well for me [3])
> written starting with a browser as a jumping off point
That's thunderbird for ya.
Really the only web-browsery thing a mail client needs is rendering of the email itself (if it's not just plain text, HTML email is an extension!), for which, sure, it's a better idea to use an existing webview. But for the rest of the interface and logic? No.
To be fair, if you're bundling a web browser to render emails, you might as well write your whole UI out of it. Of all use cases of Electron, an email client is probably the least offensive.
I agree with you. It seems like the self-hosting community is getting a decent bit of attention right now, and the ability to deploy browser-based applications is the way to go for many FOSS projects.
I think NextCloud [0] has a few apps that do G Suite-type stuff, but I don't have experience using them. Etherpad [1] also seems really good, I've used it in a few Zoom calls and the experience was smooth. Personally, I'm looking for a Google Photos alternative that's stable enough for my parents to use.
> but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it
I don't use thunderbird currently, but have for /very/ short amounts of time in the past. What seems bloated about it? For reading and writing e-mail it worked fine and other features seemed to stay out of the way in menus I didn't need to use.
Last I checked (which was a while ago), while the UI is in XUL / JavaScript, the bulk of the mail handling (POP/IMAP/SMTP, MIME parsing, etc.) was still in C++ that was extremely complex and hard to port to JavaScript. There was an attempt to rebuild a mail client in JS for FirefoxOS (the mobile phone thing that is now mostly KaiOS), but that's not used in Thunderbird as far as I know.
> software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it.
I feel like we've lost some of the point of open source. My rose-tinted glasses are probably in play, but I used to be able to use software, build it and modify it.
Today, the idea of being a "casual" contributor seems to be lost. Things need a huge build process, and some kind of management organisation. The emphasis used to be on contributing patches, not funding.
> 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.
I think what those have in common is being corporate codebases that were "dumped" as open source. If you look at the equivalents that were built as open-source from day 1 - KMail, Konqueror, and KOffice - you find something that while still C++ is much cleaner and better structured, since they were always meant to be maintained by a distributed collaboration rather than a small team of l33t h4x0rs.
> 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?
I don't think browser-based is the right direction, and I actually think browser-based may detract from having good standard UI component libraries, since the browser itself tends to fall into the trap you mentioned - browser-native components are simultaneously not great, but imposing and complex enough to suck the oxygen away from alternatives. But I agree there's a lot of value in using existing frameworks and libraries to develop your applications, and definitely something that contributes to both OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Mozilla-family applications being as complicated as they are is the fact that they include their own one-off GUI frameworks. (In fairness Mozilla did originally make a legitimate attempt to make their GUI framework an actual first-class GUI framework that could be used for other applications with XULRunner etc., but those days are long gone now). Again this is somewhere where I find KDE family applications shines in comparison - everything is properly layered between the libraries, frameworks, and applications, and the libraries actually see reuse across a wide range of applications.
Sure, it's just there's a lot of distance between compiler and browser. I'd argue the first thing to do is write a browser in Rust (I know Firefox has real components in it).
I had the strangest issue with Thunderbird during the last big upgrade, where it took my PGP key out of gpg (deleting the key from the store in the process), and stored it in Thunderbird with no protection. I must have read an encrypted email for it to have used the password, but I have no idea how this happened, and do not click "Yes" on boxes without reading them thoroughly. It took me a month of my PGP key apparently sitting unprotected before I noticed.
The fact that Thunderbird does stuff like this to me really weirds me out, despite mostly loving the program.
At least it managed to migrate your key. I just stopped encrypting/signing mail when it stopped working after the forced migration from the Enigmail add-on. Can't be bothered to look into fixing it when noone cares about PGP signurates for mail anyway.
I'm not a Thunderbird expert...but I seem to recall hearing some where that some desktop mail clients - especially Thunderbird - who use Maildir tend to also leverage sqlite (as an over-layer) to aid with content indexing and search...? If my recollection is right, that's kinda the best of both worlds: separate files (maildir) but speedy content search. :-)
Not really. Maildir does away with a host of problems ranging from file locking (the entire mbox file must be locked during writes, where maildir only requires the message being operated on the be locked), to network compatibility (no transporting a 4gb file back and forth), to corruption issues (mostly due to file size).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ?
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.
I like Thunderbird's UI. It doesn't get in the way, and more importantly, I have used it for a long time, so I know my way around it quite well. A lot of attempts to "improve" UIs end with things like Microsoft's Ribbon interface (which I really dislike).
> does not group messages by conversation
Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.
> [client-side spam filtering] is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition.
It kind of is, though. Not everyone is using GMail, and my idea of what does or does not count as Spam might differ significantly from what some email provider thinks.
I'm sure there are prettier mail clients around, and by all means, if you prefer one of those, use it. I used Apple's Mail.app when I using a Mac, because I needed to access an Exchange mailbox at the time, which sucks on Thunderbird. The UI looked shiny, I never got upset about it (UI or functionality), but I happily went back to Thunderbird when I got back to Linux.
> Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.
It's not a unified conversation view like Gmail or Fastmail. There's a plugin that does that, but it's not very pleasant either.
I'm on Linux, all other email clients are pretty bad or similarly stuck in 2005 in appearance. I am very happy with the Fastmail webapp, but Mozilla is against PWAs so I have to resort to using Chromium to keep it around as a standalone app. I would like to use Thunderbird, but I have tried getting comfortable with the UI a dozen times in as many years, and I uninstall it in frustration 30 minutes later. These days it is also very sad to open its extension store and see that most of its plugins are unmaintained and haven't been updated in years. There's a true feeling of abandonware every time I give it another chance.
I've been using it for a few years now. The UI is outdated and a bit clunky but it's worked great for me on my old Mac Mini and the old Apple Mail app is pretty much unusable now. My next best option is Roundcube Webmail, and it's pretty good too.
I have a hard time with complaining about free software. I either use it or don't, but I won't complain about it.
Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years, Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts, Mailspring is electron-based, TUIs are right out, Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird.
So yeah. For handling multiple e-mail accounts, Thunderbird works best.
> Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years
Indeed, my reaction to Geary was "wow, they managed to make KMail look good!"
> Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts
I don't like this about Evolution either; I haven't run a GNOME desktop for at least a decade, and (depending on the distro) it can be a tiny bit fiddly getting Evolution working without a GNOME desktop. It "just works" on recent NixOS versions though. Once it's installed though, it's a joy to use, while Thunderbird feels like a drag. I'm not a UI expert, so I can't put my finger on what the difference is.
> Mailspring is electron-based
I hadn't heard of mailspring previously, but I suspect we have similar views of what at typical electron-based app is like...
> TUIs are right out
I have no problem with TUIs, I use a TUI along side a gui mail client, but the latter is necessary when dealing with non text-only messages (particularly responding to).
> Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird
Maybe I'm just old, but Claws is way more usable than me than Thunderbird. The only thing it lacks for me is an html e-mail editor, which is necessary for responding and quoting to non text-only e-mails. There are plenty of good TUIs that can handle text-only e-mails, so claws isn't really something I currently have a use for.
That's my experience as well. And I would like to use KMail since I use KDE anyway. I haven't tried Mailspring but I don't feel like running another Electron app when Thunderbird does the job amazingly well.
How do you do bulk actions on emails? Clicking a checkbox for every single one? Having to write an run a query for each set of emails you want to operate on in bulk?
Here's how I do it in thunderbird. Sort by sender (or other thing). Click first email. Shift click last email. Do whatever I want (usually archive or move to a folder).
My employer turned off IMAP access a few years ago and I've basically given up managing my github/jira/mailing list spam. Filters turn out to be surprisingly fragile.
>Here's how I do it in thunderbird. Sort by sender (or other thing). Click first email. Shift click last email. Do whatever I want (usually archive or move to a folder).
This is pretty basic functionality for an email client to have. In GMail (Proton and Yandex too; probably any modern web client) works by clicking the checkbox. Click first email's checkbox. Shift click last email's checkbox.
I used the Gmail web interface once in 2005 I think? I didn't include webmail in my assessment, or the office 365 mail client would have "won" this award.
Hmmm... let me try and answer this, as someone who likes Thunderbird quite a bit (and is cool with people not liking it, but just wants to provide their own perspective).
For traditional business email, you are pretty much stuck with two options - Outlook or Thunderbird. You can try and use webmail of various types - and there are some decent webmail clients out there - but it's just not quite the same as using a good Desktop client.
For the newest Outlook versus the newest Thunderbird, Outlook wins feature wise - it does a lot of things and all of it is pretty well integrated. But if you don't need all the bells and whistles, Thunderbird, in my opinion, is oftentimes better than Outlook.
For example, I find that Thunderbird has a better search than Outlook, and better conversation capabilities (threading and open message in conversation) than Outlook. It's tagging system and archiving system are better than Outlook's. It's add-on system is easier to use then Outlook's (partly because most everything is free). It also allows much more manipulation of the UI than Outlook does as far as I'm aware. All of these things add up, and Thunderbird becomes a much more efficient email client than Outlook for me, which is important if I need to deal with 100 or so emails a day.
On top of these things, in my opinion, Thunderbird is really good and not causing issues down the line. Part of my job is to manage workplace computers (probably no where near as many as some folk here on this site, but not a really small amount either), the amount of trouble Thunderbird gives me compared to the amount of trouble Outlook gives me... well, it makes me want to make everyone use Thunderbird. There are only two things I really have to worry about with thunderbird (they relate to the calendar and mass moving large amounts of emails), but with Outlook... well... I've had to repair people's email enough that I never want to do it again. It sucks. I hate repairing .pst files.
Mmm... I personally have never tried Evolution or davmail, so I can't speak to them, unfortunately. I will have to try them later probably. As for Exchange OAuth, yeah, I can see you having some troubles with it in Thunderbird. I was having Microsoft 365's IMAP implementation give us trouble (ended up dropping it). On the other hand, it was also giving older versions of Outlook trouble... so I'm not sure I can put the blame solely on Thunderbird for this one. I do hope you find something that does what you want it to though.
> Hmmm... let me try and answer this, as someone who likes Thunderbird quite a bit (and is cool with people not liking it, but just wants to provide their own perspective).
Thanks for that. If it wasn't clear from my original comment, I'm totally cool with people liking Thunderbird.
FWIW, It seems that the intersection of <people who like Evolution> and <people who like Thunderbird> is near zero, so perhaps it's a matter of taste there.
I fully agree with your comment. Thunderbird is just plain terrible.
Over the weekend I migrated to a 100% Linux/open-source environment. So of course I went through a series of alternative apps. While you'd never find feature parity (eg. with MS Office and the Adobe Suite) existing alternatives are mostly good enough.
Thunderbird has been tooted to me as THE alternative to MS Outlook. What I found was a total mess of a software stack needing countless addons and customization to even get close to Outlook. Then I discovered Evolution. It was certainly different but worked pretty much flawlessly out of the box.
It's good you found a solution in Evolution. I don't use many extensions in Thunderbird, just one to show different colors in the new mail window depending on the account used to send the mail. I'd be interested in knowing which specific features of Outlook you needed that required extensions in Thunderbird (and that Evolution has by default).
Evolution is what I used for years until severl years ago when they greatly modified the way the email was stored. I switched back to Thunderbird. Now I discover TB is including more and more usage of sqlite (which is great for data, by my email is not data); my email is files.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
I finally set up two factor auth in gmail using FreeOTP and have Fairemail (fdroid version) configured using an app password. (I run LineageOS with no Google services installed or account setup so the OAuth method isn't an option for me)
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.