Mozilla Thunderbird just announced that they have hired the K-9 Mail dev cketti in full-time to ultimately transform K-9 into Thunderbird for Android:
K-9 Mail Joins The Thunderbird Family
To that end, we’re thrilled to announce that today, K-9 Mail officially joins the Thunderbird family. And cketti has already joined the full-time Thunderbird staff, bringing along his valuable expertise and experience with mobile platforms. Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
That means the name itself will change and adopt Thunderbird branding. Before that happens, we need to reach certain development milestones that will bring K-9 Mail into alignment with Thunderbird’s feature set and visual appearance.
To accomplish that, we’ll devote finances and development time to continually improving K-9 Mail. We’ll be adding brand new features and introducing quality-of-life enhancements.
It was getting more and more unusable and this is the final nail in the coffin.
Going into the mozilla family, you know what that means.
More resource usage, features removed one at a time and some mentally ill trans-burgerkin loading it up with crap to justify their existence. I had to switch to some garbage called fairmail because of k9 just got so broken and this was last year. I did try it recently, and it was still the same.
I think this is a really positive move. I’ve been using both K-9 and Thunderbird for a long time and I’m a fan of both. I’m particularly glad that Cketti, the developer who has kept K-9 going is going to get the support that they deserve.
This post in the K-9 forums, from the Thunderbird Product Manager, is worth a read
K-9 has always worked like a charm for me, so I hope that it doesn’t acquire any undesirable traits. I also hope that, whether as Thunderbird or as K-9, it will continue to be available from F-Droid, not just from Gulag.
I’ve used Thunderbird for years and years on my computers, and have had no major complaints, but there’s always the danger that they’ll go full-on “Mozilla Photon Proton” at some point, or add trackers and analytics.
Thunderbird is, in fact a Mozilla product. I did not like what they did to Firefox from the beginning of the Aurora beta onward. I don’t trust them - they are going to go in whatever direction they please. They will not listen to your complaints and they will not care if you don’t like the changes.
I will look at other email clients like FairEMail that you mention and abandon K9.
I dropped Thunderbird a long time ago. Naive as I am, I was going to review that decision based on @RyanSipes assertion that Thunderbird are independent of Mozilla!
FairEmail is one of the better email apps for mobile. Not sure why you think it’s garbage.
“One man’s rubbish may be another’s treasure” I guess.
To be honest, I kind of thought the same with K9. I really liked v5.600 and thought 5.7xx+ was garbage. Even moved a couple of ROMs to monocles mail which is K9 5.600 with fixes and enhancements while keeping the old UI.
