One thing to sit up for: Mozilla’s Thunderbird has lengthy been the most effective e mail purchasers for people who worth open-source software program and privateness, but it surely’s solely been out there to desktop customers. Fortuitously, that is about to vary. Quickly, Thunderbird shall be coming to Android units due to a merger (of kinds) between Mozilla’s consumer and the Okay-9 Mail app.
For those who’re questioning what Okay-9 Mail is, it is one other open supply e mail consumer, very like Thunderbird. Although it would not tout privateness as considered one of its key options, it boasts a number of others — assist for Push IMAP, white and darkish themes, message flagging, and the power to arrange ‘a number of identities’ for e mail accounts, to call a number of.
As for why Thunderbird is absorbing Okay-9 Mail now — seemingly out of the blue — it seems that these plans have been set in movement years in the past. Method again in 2018, in actual fact. On the time, Thunderbird Product Supervisor Ryan Lee Sipes met with Okay-9 mission maintainer Christian Ketterer to debate a collaboration between Okay-9 and Thunderbird. These talks ultimately advanced right into a extra strong dialogue about how the 2 separate tasks would possibly be part of forces to create an “superior, seamless e mail expertise throughout platforms.”
For Ketterer and Sipes, that does not imply growing a completely new cellular consumer collectively — however as an alternative merely making Thunderbird their collective focus.
As such, sooner or later within the hopefully not-too-distant future, Okay-9 will flip into Thunderbird’s Android consumer. The branding will change, and each the aesthetic and featureset shall be altered to match Thunderbird’s desktop counterpart.
It’ll take a variety of arduous work from the Thunderbird staff and Okay-9’s contributors to succeed in that time, after all. Nonetheless, now that Ketterer has joined the Thunderbird crew full-time, the transition ought to be a bit smoother. At any fee, we won’t wait to see Thunderbird make the leap to Android, and we hope it occurs sooner relatively than later.
