long time K-9 user, I switched to FairEmail early this year. K-9 started having problems not showing notifications for new mail last year, I put up with it for months because the issue was active on their tracker. after long enough I just had to switch so I could know when I receive mail. FairEmail has been pleasant so I don’t see myself going back even if this means they’ve fixed that problem, it has about the same feature set but the notifications work.
I just tried FairEmail and I put this in the category of begware. It is being advertised as free and open source but as soon as you set it up and view your inbox, there is a notice pinned to the top asking you to support the author by buying the pro version. You can hide this, but only for two weeks.
I don’t have a problem with someone developing free/open source apps and asking for a donation, or even releasing a free version and a pro version with more features. I don’t begrudge the author wanting to make a living either. But be up-front and honest about your intentions with the user. Having a persistent nag notification that you only find out about after going through the non-trivial work of setting up your email accounts really rubs me the wrong way.
i had forgotten about the nag since i read most of my mail straight from the notification. that’s a very fair criticism and is something i don’t condone myself. i think i’ll switch back to K-9 now that a new stable is on the horizon.
I’ve tried FairEmail for a while and uh.. it feels so cluttered and unintuitive. Threading just doesn’t work right. The screen with many mails from a thread together is very frustrating to navigate.
i rarely have threaded email chains in my personal account so i had kinda glanced over this.. but looking at one, yeah, that’s clunky. i mostly just read mail so i haven’t experienced the UX for things like sorting/tagging, composing, etc.
To be fair, K-9 doesn’t get threading right either (if you’re a participant, your sent emails aren’t together with your received emails). This is with version 5.600.
Add a feature request! Currently k9-mail always puts a copy of sent mail in the Sent folder, but it could put replies in the same folder as the mail being replied to.
I use K-9 installed via F-Droid. It’s annoying to see that Google rules are blocking an update through non-Google channels…
[ Edit: …and when I look at the ‘how do I become a beta tester’ link from the article, I discover it hasn’t. The newer versions are all there, they’re just not the ‘suggested’ version, so I need to opt in to installing them. 5.715 seems to work and is a lot more pretty than 5.600! ]
huh! I’ve been using Librem Mail (a fork of K9) so I thought the new sidebar was a Librem thing.
Librem Mail (1.1.1) unfortunately has an awful bug: going away to home/another app from the compose screen just loses all content. Not really saved to drafts, and the compose screen is closed.
Just switched to K-9 5.715 — works great. I can switch between apps and it comes back to the compose screen fine. Awesome!
It mentions needing Google Play Services (for notifications?). Does anyone know if it works (perhaps with reduced functionality) without Google Play services? Contemplating a Pixel 3a running Graphene
Not really what you’re asking but I’m running the latest version (5.600) from F-Droid on GrapheneOS without Google Play services. This one works at least.
I do have the most minimal microg installed for running a Gcam port.
Huh? Where do you see that? It’s working fine for me without Google Play Services on my OnePlus 6T running LineageOS! I’m sure the same would be true for a Pixel 3a running Graphene.
I think that sentence is referring to a Google Play (store) requirement (last year) that apps bump their targetSdk versions in AndroidManifest.
The main breaking change this resulted in is you have to add explicit runtime requests for some permissions that used to be requested at install time through AndroidManifest.xml
Ah, the “API target level” is an Android app configuration option that determines what Android APIs you can use in your app. Google Play now requires that all apps increase this to a new minimum version. It has nothing to do with Google Play Services.
Additionally to this, when Google decide to make a non backwards compatible change, they always do so by having the change only take effect when the app’s declared targetSdk version is >= the version in which the being change was introduced.
The second half of this is that a while later the Google Play store starts rejecting new apps with older targetSdk, so app devs don’t get to just leave everything on the oldest targetSdk value forever
long time K-9 user, I switched to FairEmail early this year. K-9 started having problems not showing notifications for new mail last year, I put up with it for months because the issue was active on their tracker. after long enough I just had to switch so I could know when I receive mail. FairEmail has been pleasant so I don’t see myself going back even if this means they’ve fixed that problem, it has about the same feature set but the notifications work.
I just tried FairEmail and I put this in the category of begware. It is being advertised as free and open source but as soon as you set it up and view your inbox, there is a notice pinned to the top asking you to support the author by buying the pro version. You can hide this, but only for two weeks.
I don’t have a problem with someone developing free/open source apps and asking for a donation, or even releasing a free version and a pro version with more features. I don’t begrudge the author wanting to make a living either. But be up-front and honest about your intentions with the user. Having a persistent nag notification that you only find out about after going through the non-trivial work of setting up your email accounts really rubs me the wrong way.
i had forgotten about the nag since i read most of my mail straight from the notification. that’s a very fair criticism and is something i don’t condone myself. i think i’ll switch back to K-9 now that a new stable is on the horizon.
I’ve tried FairEmail for a while and uh.. it feels so cluttered and unintuitive. Threading just doesn’t work right. The screen with many mails from a thread together is very frustrating to navigate.
i rarely have threaded email chains in my personal account so i had kinda glanced over this.. but looking at one, yeah, that’s clunky. i mostly just read mail so i haven’t experienced the UX for things like sorting/tagging, composing, etc.
To be fair, K-9 doesn’t get threading right either (if you’re a participant, your sent emails aren’t together with your received emails). This is with version 5.600.
I still use it though.
Add a feature request! Currently k9-mail always puts a copy of sent mail in the Sent folder, but it could put replies in the same folder as the mail being replied to.
I’ve been running the beta for a while (from the Play store). No complaints.
I use K-9 installed via F-Droid. It’s annoying to see that Google rules are blocking an update through non-Google channels…
[ Edit: …and when I look at the ‘how do I become a beta tester’ link from the article, I discover it hasn’t. The newer versions are all there, they’re just not the ‘suggested’ version, so I need to opt in to installing them. 5.715 seems to work and is a lot more pretty than 5.600! ]
I just found the betas in f-droid, too. First impressions are good. :-) Android 10 / Q / API 29 with 5.715.
huh! I’ve been using Librem Mail (a fork of K9) so I thought the new sidebar was a Librem thing.
Librem Mail (1.1.1) unfortunately has an awful bug: going away to home/another app from the compose screen just loses all content. Not really saved to drafts, and the compose screen is closed.
Just switched to K-9 5.715 — works great. I can switch between apps and it comes back to the compose screen fine. Awesome!
I tried to install both 5.714 and 5.715 from f-droid, but unfortunately the UI crashed.
Did not know there were beta versions! Just switched back to K-9 beta from FairMail, great so far (FairEmail is clunky).
Unfortunately I need an email address that’s hosted on google and https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655
It mentions needing Google Play Services (for notifications?). Does anyone know if it works (perhaps with reduced functionality) without Google Play services? Contemplating a Pixel 3a running Graphene
Not really what you’re asking but I’m running the latest version (5.600) from F-Droid on GrapheneOS without Google Play services. This one works at least.
I do have the most minimal microg installed for running a Gcam port.
Huh? Where do you see that? It’s working fine for me without Google Play Services on my OnePlus 6T running LineageOS! I’m sure the same would be true for a Pixel 3a running Graphene.
“So why did we not update the app? It’s a combination of things. A major factor was the API level requirement by Google Play. “
Did I mis-understand? Likely… :) Good to know though, thanks!
I think that sentence is referring to a Google Play (store) requirement (last year) that apps bump their targetSdk versions in AndroidManifest.
The main breaking change this resulted in is you have to add explicit runtime requests for some permissions that used to be requested at install time through AndroidManifest.xml
Ah, the “API target level” is an Android app configuration option that determines what Android APIs you can use in your app. Google Play now requires that all apps increase this to a new minimum version. It has nothing to do with Google Play Services.
Additionally to this, when Google decide to make a non backwards compatible change, they always do so by having the change only take effect when the app’s declared targetSdk version is >= the version in which the being change was introduced.
The second half of this is that a while later the Google Play store starts rejecting new apps with older targetSdk, so app devs don’t get to just leave everything on the oldest targetSdk value forever
Ah… Thanks all!