Mobile mail

email, software

Android does not come with a good email client! Probably not news to you, unless you use Gmail and nothing else. The Gmail app is where Google nudges you.

The email app that Android originally shipped with has seen continued development as the K9mail fork. Half a year ago I noticed that there were beta releases being made and that the UI has improved significantly since 5.600, released nearly 3 years ago now. It’s a great piece of software, and the only reason I’m looking at other is because it’s fun. But I’m noticing a strange trend of forks not mentioning removing all trace of their parent repo/developer. pEp develops PGP plugins for various desktop clients, and has their own Android email app with built-in PGP management. It looks extremely similar to K9mail, but you won’t find ‘K9mail’ mentioned anywhere on their website. Why is that? Nothing wrong with forking a FLOSS project after all.

Another excellent email client is Fairemail. Maybe even slightly better than K9mail, on account of it looking a bit fresher, and having many options (maybe too many?). Mid last year I found it still lacked certain features, but now all is stable, and there’s a fresh release nearly daily. I discovered there’s a fork of Fairemail, SimpleEmail, that does not release as often, and does not mention Fairemail anywhere, not even in their acknowledgements.md. Why wouldn’t you?

In desktop mail client news, Mailspring open sourced their sync component, making their app fully open source. The need for a Mailspring ID will be removed later this year, when I’ll be taking a look at it! Thunderbird works, but even v78 feels… rusty. You know, you don’t have to motivate trying out new software, so why am I trying?