I’m on the board of directors for a veteran nonprofit. When i was using Lineage with MicroG i used K9 mail for our Outlook email, now that I’m back on /e/ i use the Mail app.
The issue I’m finding is it does not seem to notify me of mail nearly as reliably. Often i find myself not getting informed of emails, opening up the app to see “Syncing disabled,” etc. What’s also annoying is the fact that on my backup phone it seems to work just fine. I tried to export and import the account and settings from one phone to the other, but still missed a message today.
Anyone got any tips on this?
Thanks!
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services
My advice is: don’t use the Mail app.
The mail app is a fork [1] of K-9. They had several problems in history with that. One was that the fork got outdated while K-9 did make progress. Recently they announced they want to make up leeway by doing a new fork. I don’t know if this process is completed until now. The two problems I reported a year ago (here and here) are still unresolved.
Because I also tried K-9 versions having problems (no IMAP, sudden crashes) I came to FairEmail which runs very proper for a year now.
[1] I don’t understand this forking. Normally you make a fork when you want to make something better the original will probably not provide. But where is this now better? So, what is this fork really good for? (see also Camera, Calendar, SMS app).
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eOS version 0.23 currently in testing has updated Mail app which is looking promising so far.
Until this is released I second what @irrlicht says and suggest trying another app for the timebeing. When I was using e as a daily for about a year or so I ended up using K9 as the most reliable.
Recently I’ve been quite impressed with Monocles (based on the older layout of K9) although I’m running it on another OS.
[1] I don’t understand this forking. Normally you make a fork when you want to make something better the original will probably not provide. But where is this now better? So, what is this fork really good for? (see also Camera, Calendar, SMS app).
I completely agree - forking for the sake of replacing the name of an app (are the /e/ forks any more than some design adoptions?) is stupid as fuck and introduces a ton of problems that are simply not there if you stick with upstream.
I’d really appreciate if they’d be honest and say “we build the base system and you have a ton of open source apps that can be installed at your discretion” instead of pre-installing some outdated forked apps.
That being said, i’m currently happy with my first /e/ powered phone.
I have used K-9 for several years on different devices and different ROMs (including /e/OS on my current phone). IMAP has always worked for me without problems, and I have never had any crashes - sudden or otherwise. I would recommend using K-9 from F-Droid instead of /e/'s fork. It will be less buggy, and more up to date in terms of both features and bug fixes. I use the beta versions - currently 5.914, but a new stabkr version - 6.000 - will be available soon
I was afraid the general consensus would be “use the real version.”
I agree with the sentiment with regard to forks. K-9 obviously worked better than Mail, the Notes app on our privacy focused ROM doesn’t allow for securing by way of PIN or bio-metrics, Messaging seems far more limited than QKSMS. I like /e/ a bit better than Lineage w/ MicroG but would much prefer a barebones OS and you’re on your own to find apps you like. Now I’m in a situation where in order to get the desired performance, I have to install an identical app onto my phone to replace one that doesn’t work but I can’t uninstall. At least when I do that for Brave vs. Bromite, I get the functionality of syncing across my devices.
Hopefully Chrisrg is correct and the next update to /e/ will bring about increased functionality. Until then at least, guess I’ll manually refresh once a day.
I know, K-9 is widely used and has a reputation. But my experience with K-9 is ambiguous.
The first thing I learned was: at this time (about a year ago) there seemed to be different versions of K-9 and some of them were just not able to work with IMAP servers and did cyclic polling on them as on any other server. That was not what I wanted. All my IMAP servers provide ordinary IMAP Idle (push messages). But I found then a K-9 which did it well.
After I had configured all what I needed (three IMAP servers) it did run for two or three days. Then it crashed while I had it open, I mean: it disappeared suddenly from screen. OK, can happen.
But the situation after this was interesting. It had lost all the IMAP settings I made and on all my servers. It took a while until I understood this. They all were still in synchronization and got somewhen a message but K-9 decided by himself to poll them from now on. I never switched on cyclic polling by myself. And even better: the options to reconfigure IMAP Idle (push messages) correctly had also disappeared completely from the settings. Also deleting and adding a mail server again did not allow to configure correct IMAP settings. Even uninstalling and installing K-9 did not allow it anymore. Yes, sounds incredulous, but this was the moment from which on I didn’t recomment K-9.
Yes, that’s the situation. I did this with the Launcher, Mail, SMS, Calendar and Camera apps. The SMS app was working well but since Signal does it also I use Signal also for SMS.
But QKSMS (the upstream from which /e/'s app was forked) does it better: it support back and restore of messages, whihc /e/'s fork does not.
Like you, I use the upstreams of all /e/'s forked apps, and I replace the forks with the originals in my custom build for lilac. I think the effort /e/ have put in to their forks is largely wasted, but they see it as worth it to have a “consistent UI”.
Methinks its not bad for /e/ to have a common default set of apps over which you have control and know what privacy they will provide a release or two in the future.
Thes seems also a good decision for the not so savvy techies who dont know and dont want to learn which apps are save(r).
We are always able to switch to alternatives but have a default set of fallbacks for which /e/ has the ability to give support.
Agree there’s something to be said for uniformity and /e/ having a level of control over their default apps, but i think in the long run it hurts us to tell people about /e/ but also have to say “By the way, the eMail, Notes, and Messaging apps don’t work that well, you should install these alongside them, which are literally exactly the same.”
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I can see your point too, if there are standard apps they should be a solid basis and thus provide basic functionality reliably.
I assume e is aware of this too and takes action according to their resources.
So lets have them a go for v1.0 and help by providing bug reports and work around the obstacles in the meantime.
Just had the update pushed to my OnePlus 9 Pro. Works much better now!