K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family | Hacker News Reader

K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family

k9mail.app

68 pointsjlelse16 comments

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Mozilla's version of the story already on the front page for > 2 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31725103

Don't think this means Mozilla is now putting resources to develop K-9.

Mozilla halted development of Thunderbird 10 years ago (2012) and it has been community run ever since.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-furth...

> In turn Thunderbird will ensure the app is developed further. As a first step Thunderbird hired the current K-9 Mail maintainer, cketti (coincidentally, also the author of this blog post ). Hopefully, more will follow soon.

I mean they are putting resources toward it by hiring the main dev which is a good start.

The highlight was about Mozilla the org not being involved. The Thunderbird org is definitely putting resources into this, not Mozilla.

I thought Mozilla still owned and thus funded Thunderbird. Someone must be ensuring that employees who work for the Thunderbird project are being payed even if it is a mostly community ran project.

The donation page still takes me to a Mozilla branded donation page which makes me think they are putting some resources into the project even if it isn't as fully funded as most would like.

The donations they receive via that page go directly to Thunderbird is my understanding. There was some chatter a few years back where I guess Thunderbird had some restructuring done so they could have better funding, I forget the specifics I remember discussing it here on HN though.

Edit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22170786

after some thought on this i guess im optimistic. Thunderbird always seemed to avoid the more hair-brained crap stuffed into Firefox to turn a profit like voice chat.

Thunderbird on the desktop is over 200mb these days, so it will be interesting to see if k9 can avoid turning into a chungus on my phone.

I’ve become so dejected over huge app sizes when I saw 200 mb for an email app, I thought “not bad”

Sorry to add salt to the wound, but I have to give honorable mention to the Slack APK. 50 MB for an IRC client. Just... WOW!

Pro-Tip: Enable desktop mode promptly after clicking the bookmark in your browser. If you're fast enough, you may not get the App-Nag-Screen© and have a short wait for the bloat to load. YMMV.

Thunderbird on desktop is unusable for me on privacy grounds; it phones home in the same manner as Firefox.

I hope this behavior does not infect K-9 Mail.

What is your threat model?

Service exploits, MITM shenanigans, DB breaches, marketing assault...

Need I go on?

I don't need a threat model to wish to preserve my privacy from second parties. What is the threat model for not putting public cameras in your shower?

I want a mail client that connects to my mail server and nothing else. Any functionality that involves connecting to anyone or anything beyond that is unwanted.

You'll note that client IP is coarse location. Any service that has persistent identifiers and is contacted daily gets your travel history.

So there's Thunderbird for desktop Linux and K-9 Mail for mobile Android. I'd love to see mobile Linux somewhere on the roadmap here.

Right now there's Geary, which is OK for what it is but quite limited and basic. I imagine that either mobile-friendly UI for Thunderbird and Linux non-Android K-9 would be quite serious efforts, though.

Not that you would, but please don't ruin it.

If they do manage to blow it up it can always be forked, it is free software after all.

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