Something to sit up for: Mozilla’s Thunderbird has lengthy been among the finest e mail shoppers for people who worth open-source software program and privateness, nevertheless it’s solely been obtainable to desktop customers. Fortunately, that is about to alter. Soon, Thunderbird will probably be coming to Android gadgets due to a merger (of types) between Mozilla’s shopper and the Ok-9 Mail app.
If you are questioning what Ok-9 Mail is, it is one other open supply e mail shopper, very similar to Thunderbird. Though it does not tout privateness as certainly one of its key options, it boasts a number of others — help 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 couple of.
As for why Thunderbird is absorbing Ok-9 Mail now — seemingly out of the blue — it seems that these plans had been set in movement years in the past. Way again in 2018, in truth. At the time, Thunderbird Product Manager Ryan Lee Sipes met with Ok-9 venture maintainer Christian Ketterer to debate a collaboration between Ok-9 and Thunderbird. Those talks ultimately developed right into a extra strong dialogue about how the 2 separate tasks would possibly be a part of forces to create an “superior, seamless e mail expertise throughout platforms.”
For Ketterer and Sipes, that does not imply creating a completely new cell shopper collectively — however as a substitute merely making Thunderbird their collective focus.
As such, sooner or later within the hopefully not-too-distant future, Ok-9 will flip into Thunderbird’s Android shopper. The branding will change, and each the aesthetic and featureset will probably be altered to match Thunderbird’s desktop counterpart.
It will take a variety of onerous work from the Thunderbird staff and Ok-9’s contributors to achieve that time, after all. However, now that Ketterer has joined the Thunderbird crew full-time, the transition ought to be a bit smoother. At any price, we will not wait to see Thunderbird make the leap to Android, and we hope it occurs sooner slightly than later.
