K-9 Mail is
free and open source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
email client
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
for
Android. It is designed as an alternative to the stock email clients included with the platform; it supports both
POP3
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most comm ...
and
IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of pe ...
protocols and supports
IMAP IDLE
In email technology, IDLE is an IMAP feature described iRFC 2177that allows a client
Client(s) or The Client may refer to:
* Client (business)
* Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer
* Custom ...
for real-time notifications. The project is named after the ''
Doctor Who'' character
K9.
In 2015 the project received $86,000 of funding from the
Open Technology Fund
The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is an American nonprofit corporation that aims to support global Internet freedom technologies. Its mission is to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and ...
.
On 13 June 2022, it was announced that K-9 Mail had been taken over by
MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...
with current maintainer Christian Ketterer joining the team, and plans for K-9 Mail to be rebranded as
Thunderbird for Android following the completion of a feature roadmap, including sync with Thunderbird on PC, integrating Thunderbird's automated account setup system, message filtering, and improvements to folders.
Reception
This application has been downloaded from the Google Play Store between 5 million and 10 million times since its release and has been rated by over 90,000 people with almost as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews many due to the fundamental restructuring of the program in August 2021, which was not widely accepted by the user base and more recently because of unacceptable battery usage when using push to fetch mail. It has been widely reviewed, and was particularly praised in the media between 2011 and 2013 as a replacement for the default mail application.
Features
* Works with IMAP, POP3
* Folder Sync
* Encryption with
OpenKeychain support
* Signatures
* SD Card Storage
Missing features
* The application does not allow viewing the sender name and sender e-mail address at the same time when viewing an e-mail. Its either display the sender name or display the sender e-mail address.
* The application does not allow text mode reading of e-mails, meaning web content in e-mails will render, posing a security risk.
* The application does not allow the viewing of e-mail source code.
* The application does not allow composing an e-mail mono-spaced font, which makes it difficult to include Ascii Art or just simply align items in a list.
* The application does not allow switching off automatically opening HTML attachments, which might expose the user to phishing.
See also
*
Comparison of email clients
*
Firefox for Android
Firefox for Android is a web browser developed by Mozilla for Android smartphones and tablet computers. As with its desktop version, it uses the Gecko layout engine, and supports features such as synchronization with Firefox Sync, blocking web ...
References
External links
Official WebsiteGithub DevelopmentWiki Page
*
*
{{Mozilla
Free and open-source Android software
Free email software