Mozilla Thunderbird for Android is now available in beta, built upon the K-9 Mail app.
The beta includes core email features like account setup, email organization, and notifications, with feedback encouraged from users.
Thunderbird for Android will remain a separate app from K-9 Mail, requiring users to migrate if they previously used K-9.
For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it’s because they aren’t different.
They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application’s name. It’s literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.
Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.
As long as it’s compliant with Thunderbird, eg. using the same autoconfig at /mail/config-v1.1.xml, I’m happy.
I cannot imagine that it would support that. Android generally does not give its users root access…
No, autoconfig is a way for mail servers to tell clients the config they should use (ports, ssl/starttls, username, name/domain of the server, authentication for imap, pop and smtp). There are multiple standards by different mail client devs, eg. Thunderbird, K-9 Mail and some other check for autoconfig.<mailserverdomain>/mail/config-v1.1.xml and outlook etc. check for a “autodiscover” SRV record, or use autodiscover.<emaildomain> or check <emaildomain>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml. As you see, it’s a mess. Well, only Outlooks “standard” is, as usually you wouldn’t care because M$ Winshit
CrasherServer does that automatically, so they don’t care about good docs. Thunderbirds autoconfig is pretty well made and documented tho.Oh right, that’s a server URL path, I thought it was just some config file one would have on their Linux host.
And this says that K-9 supports the same autoconfig as Thunderbird, so presumably the rebranded app would, too: https://forum.k9mail.app/t/autodiscover-autoconfig/7118
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/releases/tag/THUNDERBIRD_8_0b1
Here’s the release page if you wanna grab it from github :)
Edit: Didn’t intend that to be a winky face, not trying to be smug 😅
Honestly, if you’re in the audience for Thunderbird on Android, you probably want to have a look at FairMail instead.
I’m sure it’s a very capable email client, but the UI just didn’t mesh well with me.
I’ve really tried to use it, im sorry it’s just so ugly
Why? What does FairMail do better? The headline says it’s privacy oriented, but so is k-9.
I love FairEmail’s simplified mail viewer that doesn’t render HTML mails completely and they look more like an enhanced plain text mail instead.
I’d say customizability. Haven’t used k-9 since I found FairEmail so can’t really say anything about how it is now but it used to be pretty bare bones. At least compared to FairEmail.
*FairEmail
I’d love FairMail for desktop Linux
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OK, I switched. I don’t know if it’s a placebo because it looks identical but ut feels smoother.
For me it definitely looks different, are you sure you have the new version…? They’ve updated a lot of the UI elements to material design 3, but kept all the same layout and whatnot
I really like it so far! Feels like a really welcome refresh
So excited about this! It looks and feels great.
I couldn’t find it on froid
It’s just launched today in beta. I’d expect it to be there eventually, but you can grab it from GitHub if you want to try it.
‘You can download Thunderbird Beta on the Google Play Store, or get the latest pre-release version from the Github Releases page.’
Won’t appear. Mozilla is a bitch about trademarks.
Well, an unbranded build would be perfectly possible, like how “Fennec” is just a build of Firefox. In case they continue to release updates for K-9, that would be an unbranded app right there…
They have said that they will continue to release identical versions of each in the immediate future.
Cool, that seems like the best way to handle this.
Nice to see progress, but so far it seems indistinguishable from K-9.
The feature to import settings from K-9 doesn’t work for me, possibly as a consequence of running CalyxOS.
Anyone make the switch from Aquamail?
I’m interested in Thunderbird but I’ve been very happy with aquamail, so no reason to switch
