Anything to seem ahead to: Mozilla’s Thunderbird has extensive been one of the finest electronic mail consumers for people that worth open up-supply software and privateness, but it truly is only been accessible to desktop customers. The good thing is, that’s about to change. Before long, Thunderbird will be coming to Android devices many thanks to a merger (of sorts) concerning Mozilla’s consumer and the K-9 Mail app.
If you might be pondering what K-9 Mail is, it really is yet another open up supply electronic mail consumer, significantly like Thunderbird. Even though it doesn’t tout privateness as 1 of its critical features, it features many many others — help for Thrust IMAP, white and dim themes, concept flagging, and the skill to established up ‘multiple identities’ for e mail accounts, to identify a few.
As for why Thunderbird is absorbing K-9 Mail now — seemingly out of the blue — it turns out that these designs have been established in motion many years back. Way back again in 2018, in truth. At the time, Thunderbird Item Supervisor Ryan Lee Sipes met with K-9 undertaking maintainer Christian Ketterer to examine a collaboration among K-9 and Thunderbird. Individuals talks finally advanced into a much more sturdy discussion about how the two individual initiatives may be part of forces to create an “wonderful, seamless e mail working experience across platforms.”
For Ketterer and Sipes, that won’t indicate building an totally new cellular shopper jointly — but as a substitute just making Thunderbird their collective target.
As this kind of, at some place in the hopefully not-way too-distant foreseeable future, K-9 will switch into Thunderbird’s Android customer. The branding will transform, and equally the aesthetic and featureset will be altered to match Thunderbird’s desktop counterpart.
It will get a lot of challenging operate from the Thunderbird staff and K-9’s contributors to reach that issue, of program. On the other hand, now that Ketterer has joined the Thunderbird crew entire-time, the transition should be a little bit smoother. At any price, we can’t hold out to see Thunderbird make the leap to Android, and we hope it comes about quicker fairly than later on.
