Email client K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android

K-9's project maintainer will join the Thunderbird team.

Read the whole story

 

[Elideb]

This is good. I've been struggling with the fact that there's not really a good, free, trustworthy, maintained local mail client for Android.

So, I've just been logging into webmail using Chrome, for my email checking needs, but I'd rather have a POP3/IMAP client.

I thought about using K-9, but wasn't real familiar with it, and it seemed to be unmaintained, I thought.

Check out "fairemail"; it is open-source, and works with Oauth (I don't think K9 does, which is why I switched).

For Oauth, you need fairemail via playstore, not f-droid.

Edit -- no affiliation beyond being a satisfied user.

Oath is the problem I was running into. Does anyone know, does Thunderbird desktop support that now? Will this one support it?

Thunderbird does support OAuth2, at least on the major mail providers. But due to OAuth2 being the anti-standard it is, it's hard to say it will work with all services.

 

[Elideb]

As a user of both Thunderbird and K-9, I'm glad this is happening. It's probably been triggered by the OAuth2 wows K-9 has had, and how hard that is to maintain (not enough licenses to enable Google's OAuth from GiHub, Google Play Store and F-Droid; each OAuth2 service requiring its own tweaked implementation...).

I'm sure K-9 has recently bled a lot of users because of Google's scary "untrusted app" messaging, which could have been avoided had this agreement, or help, come sooner. But, in the long run, both Thunderbird and K-9 will surely benefit from this.

Free email clients need all the support they can get, because Google and Microsoft are making things really hard for the small players.