K-9 Mail and Thunderbird are both community-funded projects. We’ll be adding brand new features and introducing quality-of-life enhancements. To accomplish that, we’ll devote finances and development time to continually improving K-9 Mail. Before that happens, we need to reach certain development milestones that will bring K-9 Mail into alignment with Thunderbird’s feature set and visual appearance. That means the name itself will change and adopt Thunderbird branding. Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android. And cketti has already joined the full-time Thunderbird staff, bringing along his valuable expertise and experience with mobile platforms. To that end, we’re thrilled to announce that today, K-9 Mail officially joins the Thunderbird family. “Ultimately,” Sipes says, “it made sense to work together instead of developing a mobile client from scratch.” K-9 Mail Joins The Thunderbird Family It had to be open source, respect the user, and be a perfect fit for power users who crave customization and a rich feature set. Throughout the following few years, the conversation evolved into how to create an awesome, seamless email experience across platforms.īut Ryan and cketti both agreed that the final product had to reflect the shared values of both projects. The two instantly wanted to find a way for the two projects to collaborate.

That’s when Thunderbird Product Manager Ryan Lee Sipes first met up with Christian Ketterer (aka “cketti”), the project maintainer for open-source Android email client K-9 Mail.

For years, we’ve wanted to extend Thunderbird beyond the desktop, and the path to delivering a great Thunderbird on Android™ experience started in 2018.

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