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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#161

Post by mxuribe »

8845327 wrote: post #125

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…

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."

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#162

Post by dylan604 »

decrypt wrote: post #108
pmontra wrote: post #66

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…

May I ask what Thunderbird local storage means? Does that mean that emails are delivered and stored on the device, vs on a cloud server?

Yeah, to me, it sounds like a confusion in understanding what IMAP and POP email accounts are and how they work.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#163

Post by mxuribe »

fartcannon wrote: post #131

I wish companies like Mozilla offered simple email hosting. Something I could use with a custom domain. Cheap, like tutanota.

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.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#164

Post by dylan604 »

ryanleesipes wrote: post #70
xg15 wrote: post #38

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 Thunderbi…

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…

>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

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#165

Post by danShumway »

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.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#166

Post by fnord123 »

pmontra wrote: post #66

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…

> 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?

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#167

Post by danShumway »

pmontra wrote: post #66

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…

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.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#168

Post by dylan604 »

longrod wrote: post #82
prophesi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) wi…

>I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive.

It's telling that the only browser vendor that feels this way has the logo of one of the two most privacy invading companies in existence.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#169

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #110
pmontra wrote: post #66

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…

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#170

Post by Macha »

ycombinator_acc wrote: post #159

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.

My one wish for K-9 is swipe-to-archive (or like the fastmail app, swipe to custom selected action).

Other than that, while it's generally just... a bit ugly, it functions fine for me.

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