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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

I have been using K9 for a long time on Android. No complaints. I guess most Apple users will simply use the default email client, which works well and is probably better integrated and has a better UI than Thunderbird.

On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email/CardDAV/CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.

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K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck. The ui is clunky but worst of all, the search is bad. Very bad.

If you don’t do anything special, that will be enough but for everyone else that won’t do it.

If I type ‘repor’ in Apple mail, It will show me all report before I even type enter. And if there is too much, I will then add ‘2026’ for instance.

On k9, first you got to type the entire word because it won’t progressively search as you type, but then you press enter and see hundreds of mail so you want to add 2026 ? Too bad. Got to type report once again followed by 2026. Made a typo mistake ? Got to rewrite it all over again.

This is just bad.

And I’m not trying to diminish the work done by Thunderbirds/k9 developer, it’s just that it’s done by unpaid developers and it shows. Things move slowly and just suck at using.

Isn't a lot of that just the suckiness of the IMAP protocol? Mozilla is pushing to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, and they're planning on using it in their upcoming Thundermail hosted email service.

Having to retype the search phrase is just a plain old ux bug

I get this, but most email is through Google and Microsoft in NA, at least, neither of which seem to care to support JMAP at all, on fact they are getting locked down more and more.

Obviously they want you to use the web interface so they can show you ads and gather more data about you (for ads).

JMAP support turns out to be a strong signal for the business model of an e-mail provider. IMAP they have to have, JMAP is for those who actually care about supporting local client software.

No, it starts by searching the emails that it has loaded locally first, and then there is a button if you want to search on the server.

> K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck.

Is there anything better though?

https://email.faircode.eu/

I'm sorry but fairemail has easily the most convoluted UI I have ever had the misfortune to gaze upon in my life. Like seriously what the hell is going on there.

It's quite cluttered UI for sure but it actually works and you actually get notifications when new mails come in, which is more than could be said about k9 the last two times I tried it.

I agree but at the end the convulated Ui makes you waste so much time.

Even just searching for a setting can take 5 minutes, and you often got to look for them because default settings make no sense at all.

Not free, but I've been an AquaMail user on Android for years. IMHO there is nothing better out there.

And for mac OS, there is MailMate (also not free}, which has it's quirks but damn is it good. I gave up on ThunderBird more than ten years ago.

Email clients demand to have dedicated, paid developers.

What do you like about mailmate? Went to their website and it’s pretty spartan. No idea what makes it worth an annual subscription

I use FairEmail and paid the 7€ for the Pro features.

I don't understand how scrolling is so bad. There's some kind of frame-in-a-frame effect where both frames try to scroll at the same time, and it just rapidly blinks one of the scroll bars on the edge.

Why would you ever need to search emails more than maybe a day or two old?

Because as much as I often wish that it didn't, the past exists...

Lol

Common use case for me is tickets for events/activities that have the email attachment as ticket.

You buy the ticket some time in advance but then need to show it to enter the event.

Search on desktop thunderbird sucks too. I wanted to find an email with file://foo/bar, but it ignored the non latin characters and still couldn't find it. I gave up and grepped the mbox archive instead.

You can also prop up the "advanced search" in TB (ctrl-shift-f).

I'm sorry, are you claiming that Apple Mail has good search? Like, the thing that had search so bad that they had to explain that they had once again fixed search in the latest OS on stage at WWDC?

Things are a lot worse than Spotlight on a number of platforms...

Apple mail has excellent search, there are filters, it indexes file content and is done locally so it’s very fast. What more do you want ?

It working

Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven't set up an email client in 20 years

I don’t know what most do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps.

If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to Mail Accounts, click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.

Oh for sure. Huge assumption on my part. I just feel like 90% of people I work and interact with have a gmail account, and the last 5 companies I've worked at used gmail. I think the last time I setup Apple Mail was for my Grandma so she could see her old Cox account emails and Gmail emails in the same app.

The default Mail app still doesn’t support push Gmail, does it? That’s the only thing keeping me from using it. I otherwise strongly prefer Mail.app.

That’s Google’s choice, not Apple’s lack of support.

Source? I thought Apple gated XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE so 3rd party accounts on the mail.app fallback to fetch/poll.

Push works with Yahoo and Exchange. Google used to allow it, but stopped (apparently in 2013): https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-26-gmail-push-notification-...

Also with FastMail. (I don’t use them but they’re on the top of my list next time I decide to switch.)

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/push-email-now-available-in-io...

Mail does support it, but Google refuses to allow it. They used to, in the past.

Absolutely not. I see a huge number of iPhone users for in person tech support and most use the Apple Mail app. These are ordinary people who know nothing about pocket computers.

Thanks for your data for sure. I used to work in customer facing hardware support, but only have my friends and coworkers to go off of now.

Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.

I recently switched from android back to iOS and tried to use mail.app for everything, as I rather like it.

Unfortunately it doesn’t sync properly with Gmail. I am in the process of de-googling my life so that’s okay with me. I use mail.app with my fastmail account and it’s perfect.

> Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app?

People here are discussing email apps, not Gmail apps.

Gmail apps only work with 1 provider (gmail), while email apps works with all email providers.

You can add other emails to the Gmail app actually

I think you can actually add other providers to Gmail, but my comment was about how most people I know only use Gmail, and they have no need to configure their os-of-choice's mail app. I guess that was kind of implied. Sorry if I was ambiguous!

I might be an anomaly. I've ran iPhones before and have an iCloud email address presumably, but have only ever used the Gmail app for email on my iOS devices. And on my other machines I just use the web app. This seems to be the same for most people I've worked with in the last 5 years or so. Obviously it's super anecdotal and just from observation.

Ditto - another long-time K9mail user on Android.

Tried a couple of other clients from time to time (mostly when OAUTH logins for GMail and Outlook365 weren't implemented yet), but haven't been convinced to switch.

Standalone email has really been a frustration when it comes to using Linux. I was happy with Mailspring, but it doesn't really work with my window manager. Thunderbird does way too much and its default search behavior is unacceptably bad. I've tried a few other clients and been extremely unhappy with them for various reasons.

Thunderbird for Android is just a fork of K9, after having acquired it. They're maintaining it for the foreseeable future.

I bounced off of k9 several times. I could never get it to actually work reliably. I would get an email and never get a notification unless I opened the app to manually check. It was like the bad old days of pop3.

Awful, awful app. Fairemail was much better for a power user.

From what I've heard though, Mail has pretty horrible searching in Apple land. Just for that, it may be worth it to look at alternatives.

It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.

IMAP is a horrifically insufficient protocol. Literally every mail provider just implements their own custom JSON protocol to use with their own proprietary apps. Fastmail created JMAP which was meant to be an open source standard but so far only Fastmail uses it so it's just another provider specific protocol and client.

I do think 2027 might be the year that JMAP finally gets wider adoption! Between Thunderbird using Stalwart for their hosted product, and the fact that the new agentic tools are very good at writing JMAP integrations, I expect plenty of much better JMAP tooling.

I'm also close to a much more releasable version of the proxy which was first written back in 2014: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl/ -- which can wrap existing IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV/Submission infrastructure so you can access it via JMAP.

I use icloud and this does not match my experience ... apple mail search has been insufficient on ios and macos for 15 years or more at this point ...

I use icloud also and concur. Search in Apple Mail is poor.

Not sure what the difference is then. I use iCloud Mail and didn’t have problems with search on iOS or MacOS, I did however have plenty of issues with search when syncing my work Outlook email via Mail.app, so I assumed there was something special about iCloud (similarly to how Mail.app offers push email only for iCloud and FastMail). I’ve imported decades of email into my account so it’s not about a small email volume either.

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