Email Client K-9 Mail Will Become Thunderbird for Android (arstechnica.com) 46
The open source Thunderbird email client has a long and storied history, but until now, that history has been limited to the desktop. That's about to change, according to a post on the Thunderbird blog. Thunderbird will be coming to Android through the popular open source mobile email client K-9 Mail. From a report: According to Thunderbird's Jason Evangelho, the Thunderbird team has acquired the source code and naming rights to K-9 Mail. K-9 Mail project maintainer Christian Ketterer (who goes by "cketti" in the OSS community) will join the Thunderbird team, and over time, K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android. Thunderbird's team will invest finance and development time in K-9 to add several features and quality-of-life enhancements before that happens, though.
Will it support exchange? (Score:2)
Will it support OAuth2? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will it support OAuth2? (Score:4, Informative)
...but lack of support for OAuth2 forced me to switch. [...] I look forward to hopefully one day switching back to K9.
It's merged. [github.com] Release still pending.
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I can't build it myself but will for sure try out a beta apk on my backup phone when it is available. Good to see the whole project seems to be alive again and props the the people involved!
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Impeccable timing for v6.1. [github.com] The Microsoft OAuth2 is still pending testing, but it looks like the Yahoo / AOL (/ Verizon / "Oath" ?) stuff works.
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Look forward to this being added to the Play Store for auto updates again in the future, but happy to test new apks in the meantime
Thanks again to all the people working on this!
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Office365 mail services for enterprise are NOT the same thing. It's a bloody awful combination that emulates exchange, imap and pop3 and doesn't follow its own defaults.
The better question is: will it support gmail?
Thunderbird doesn't support custom columns, and gmail has a 'folder' column to determine if it's 'filed'. Otherwise, it's in Schroedinger's inbox
I seriously wish them well, but getting the features that TB needs and getting them to Android/iPhone is not
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Gmail imperfectly maps labels to IMAP folders. Works alright. So if K-9/New Thunderbird support IMAP and also supports OAUTH2, then yes it should work pretty well wtih Gmail. I've been using Gmail with Thunderbird on the desktop for at least 15 years. So far Google hasn't quite managed to break it completely yet, but I'm sure they will soon.
Re: Will it support exchange? (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me what Oauth2 has to do with email? Pop3 and IMAP have their own authentication built-in. I am confused.
Re: Will it support exchange? (Score:4, Informative)
IMAP supports many different kinds of authentication. But from what I understand the way OAuth is used by Google for IMAP is out-of-band and isn't part of IMAP directly. Google requires OAuth authentication for just about everything these days, with all sorts of traditional protocols. Under the hood I think Google and Oauth create a hash of some kind that's then used as a part of the standard IMAP authentication process (the password hash I suppose). So it's just a way of securely generating an IMAP password.
I believe that if you enable two-factor authentication, you can create a dedicated IMAP password that will be used in IMAP with no need for the email client to know anything about OAuth.
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Thank you
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The authentication to the OAuth server is out of band but the process has to be initiated and completed within the mail protocol for it to work.
The server has to advertise the authentication methods it supports. If OAuth is on the list, the client can open a browser window for the user to authenticate to the OAuth server, and get a token back to the mail client. The mail client then sends that token via the mail protocol. The server has to support receiving the OAuth token via the mail protocol to authorize
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K-9 was essentially the *only* usable mail client I found on Android for even getting close to features that we needed for *reading email* for the way school sent my son e-mails.
Of course, I had to have thunderbird running on another machine via IMAP to implement all of the message rules that we needed
Nice vis-a-vis FairMail (Score:3)
Since FairMail got discontinued, K-9 was the would-be only option, but gosh things like attachments are rough and need updating to modern Android.
I can't remember if Mozilla owns Thunderbird or hates Thunderbird this week, but whomever hired the developer is doing the world a lot of good. Open-source PGP mobile mail is important to have. Usability means more will use it, and development time is always at a premium.
Kudos all around.
Re: Nice vis-a-vis FairMail (Score:5, Informative)
Oh no puh-leeze! (Score:2, Flamebait)
K-9 Mail is great. If Mozilla touches it, it'll become bloated and slow :(
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I hope K-9 doesn't become Mozillified... (Score:3, Interesting)
I like K-9 mail, although I can see where it could have a few additional features and could be more convenient. I just don't trust the organization that turned Firefox into the shit-show it currently is, and that 'browserfied' Thunderbird with pointless crap like a default search engine and cookies, to deliver a clean, lean, uncluttered Android client. In fact, I wouldn't put it past Mozilla to have the browser and email client inseparable in one bloated 'Mozilla for Android' app. Remember, you heard it here first.
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Remember, you heard it here first
Actually, they heard it just above you first.
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Genuine question. I use the Google Mail app, and it's fine. Email is a pretty basic form of communication for me, not something I really need any advanced features for. Just view mails and search, that's it. So what does K-9 offer that Google Mail app doesn't?
I'm interested to know because maybe I can get more out of email. I used to use dedicated clients on desktop, back when mailing lists were a big deal. I used Thunderbird for a while, but eventually just switched to the Gmail website. No GPG but I never
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call me old (Score:2)
on a Novell network.
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"Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time, a long time."
I miss Pegasus Mail. It was so customizeable, configurable, and feature-rich, and the pages of settings actually did something useful and significant when changed. Fun times back then when you socialized through email...before the dark times, before the controlling & echo-chamber (anti)social media appeared.
Did you know it is still in active development? The developer just implemented Oauth to appease Lord Google. Unfortunately it's win
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"Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time, a long time."
That and Eudora.
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Great news (Score:3)
I've been a K9 user for years and started supporting them financially a while back. It is basically the only reason I'm still in the Android ecosystem - if they had a feature comparable version for iPhone I would jump ship immediately.
For me it's best feature is that it can be used as a proper offline mail client. If you're travelling and not sure you'll have Internet while in transit, you can be a lot more comfortable knowing your travel related emails are safely accessible, including attachments.
Re:Great news (Score:4, Informative)
Also, it's pretty lame to say "according to a post on the Thunderbird blog" and then link to a totally different website.
The Thunderbird blog post is here [thunderbird.net].
Wildcard identities? (Score:2)
It would be so sweet if that feature were added. I frequently spin-off new identities as a form of spam isolation. It is too much pain to maintain a separate entry for each identity. There is no way I could maintain separate databases for desktop and mobile. At this point in time, only Thunderbird and Mutt allow me to seamlessly match *@example.com in incoming mail. As a result, I only reply from my phone if it is so important that it can't wait until I get to a real computer.
Originally, only Mutt did
The new vanilla K9? Do. Not. Want. (Score:5, Informative)
Very long-time K9 user here.
K9 was amazing, until the early 2022 "upgrade" that stripped it of of it's multi-account pane, and dumped Material Design all over it, making it look and act just like GMail. Moved all the buttons to the top, out of thumb reach. Planning to remove POP3. Many other dysfunctions.
If I wanted GMail, wouldn't I have been using that on Android already?
Developer is resistant to all voices decrying the removal of useful features, the terrible usability of the "new" K9 - even blocked one of his own contributors for predicting the outcry over the wreckage.
I pinned back to a prior version after trying, with many other dissatisfied users, to get the dev to listen to reason.
If someone makes an honest fork of the old version, I'll gladly head back there.
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^^THIS^^
No mod points to give, sorry. Just like Mozilla/Thunderbird... too many religious wars to "advance" to something new, even if "new" is less functional than its predecessors.
But yeah, wish someone would back-port OAuth2 et al. Y'know, like actually ADDING new stuff as the world demands it.
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Did anyone ever fork K9 from that last good version?
Re: The new vanilla K9? Do. Not. Want. (Score:2)
There was a moribund fork of an earlier version, and I tried it, but it was older and unmaintained.
does it allows to edit the "from" field? (Score:3)
Most mail client don't allow you to edit the from field. Thunderbird on desktop does.
Bonus if it replies using the email address the message was received on, even if it's random1373747@mydomain.com
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Most mail client don't allow you to edit the from field. Thunderbird on desktop does.
Bonus if it replies using the email address the message was received on, even if it's random1373747@mydomain.com
Depends on what you mean, exactly. Free-form editing?
K-9 Mail currently lets you setup sending identities, and you can select which to send as in the Compose screen. It also auto-switches between identities, if a matching one exists.
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This is not enough, I need an infinite number of identities.
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Negative. Each identity has to be individually added ahead of use. Thunderbird was the same until very recently. Considering how long it took to get virtual identities into Thunderbird, I'm not optimistic that it will make it into K-9 soon.
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For years the virtual identity add-on on Thunderbird allowed to do that, so it's nothing new.
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For years the virtual identity add-on on Thunderbird allowed to do that, so it's nothing new.
Yes, and for years the Thunderbird developers refused to incorporate those features into the mainline while blocking the add-on from their official "store" and breaking in at every turn until they finally broke it permanently. I don't know what the problem is but the Thunderbird organization has a strong and lasting resistance to this kind of feature.
BTW, Mutt has been doing this since the '90s but it doesn't have a GUI.
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I stayed on an old version of TB for that reason. But I'm glad they finally accepted the function into TB itself.
It's still the only special feature I care about and not many email clients have it.
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Have not seen the new "features" you speak of as I migrated off because of the lack of Oauth2 support
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Google Likely Thunderbird's Enemy (Score:2)
I hope they become more responsive (Score:1)
I posted a patch for a long-standing bug a few weeks ago (the inability to connect to servers via IPv6 through some kinds of routers - something that affected quite a few users). Response: nothing. No acknowledgement, no thanks, not even a "thanks but no thanks"; just silence. Let's hope that was just because the team was busy cutting the Mozilla deal, and will improve in the future.
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I discovered that in the code there actually were some methods for doing this already, but that there was no UI for them. I wanted to know whether to concentrate my efforts on exposing those, and added the question to the Bugzilla issue.
The resu
Too many issues (Score:2)
If they clean it up, maybe.
The issues with getting prompt email notifications are too much for me.
The fact that you have to change so many settings that are unclear as to what they mean and where they are located is another deal breaker.
If I say I want immediate notifications I shouldn't have to consider if it is Android 5 or android 11. It should work immediately without tweaking. I shouldn't have to do an thing except get mail, seriously.