K-9 Mail is now Thunderbird
K-9 Mail is now Thunderbird
An evolving list of frequently asked questions about Thunderbird on Android, and K-9 Mail joining the Thunderbird family.
Just a note that it's now also available on F-Droid
Yeah, took me by surprise to see thunderbird on my phone. I remember talks about K9 planning to join the Thunderbird project and got excited, but completely forgot about it until I saw it on my phone.
I think it's weird that they insisted all along that K-9 would remain its own branded version of the joint app. Yet according to f-droid, my newly updated K-9 (same app I've used for a decade and a half) is now one of two "Thunderbird for beta testers" listed...
It's still K-9 in my local app menu, the icon is the same, but I guess the Thunderbird project are sort of working out how to manage two differently branded versions of the same app?
Apparently it's a metadata bug, K9 shouldn't be listed as Thunderbird. See comments ITT.
Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla's own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins happening.
Did you get any mismatched IDs from Obtainium? Think I have to reinstall.
Isn't this part of the auto configuration stuff? Basically there's a standard where you can add some DNS records to your domain and/or a standard file on your website so e-mail clients can automatically prepopulate all the email settings so you only need to worry about entering your email and password.
That might be it, Thunderbird works really well with auto configuration of domains that it doesn't know but has DNS entries.
FYI this is from 2022 but is relevant because Thunderbird (and K9 v8) just landed in F-Droid (and other android package managers I guess but I haven't checked).
The process of importing from K9 Mail worked without issue for me. There is also the option to import from desktop using a QR scanner (or some kind of scanner, again I didn't go down that rabbit hole).
I was surprised when in update menu I saw Thunderbird. Thought I accidentally downloaded it
Why post an article from 2022? Did something happen lately about K9/Thunderbird?
Thunderbird is finally out of beta so you can get it through the play store or F-Droid. K-9 itself was also updated so it's now basically a K-9 branded version of Thunderbird.
Idk about other sources, but I get my apk directly from GitHub via Obtainium, and my app recently changed from K-9 Mail to Thunderbird. Icon, app name, and app theming changed. This has been in the works for a while but seems like they're officially switched the apk.
Will I be able to sync my Thunderbird accounts with K-9 Mail?
Yes. We plan to offer Firefox Sync as one option to allow you to securely sync accounts between Thunderbird and K-9 Mail. We expect this feature to be implemented in the summer of 2023.
So is this sync functionality already available? (Edit: Citation corrected)
Its been in testing for a bit. It got bumped from the last major desktop Thunderbird release and since Thunderbird releases used to be synced to firefox ESR releases its been a slow turnaround to get their schedule moving faster.
Not yet. Anyway OP shouldn't have posted an article from 2022.
I'm not seeing it in my just-upgraded "Thunderbird Beta for Testers".
If only there was a automatic configuration export/import
Come to iOS 😍
What is the deal with this anyway? Why has this not happened yet?
K-9 is probably an Android only client? They'd have to either find an open source iOS app to build on, or build a new one from scratch.
Rip.
