Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the most popular mail clientsavailable for download on Windows, Mac and Linux, although last month we were surprised that a mobile version was on the way, and soon.
Little did we know about Thunderbird for mobiles, its appearance or possible functions, until now, when the plan of the application to make the leap to mobiles has been announced: will be based on the veteran K-9 Mail appan open source email client with over 5 million downloads on Google Play and now owned by Mozilla.
Thunderbird for Android will be the K-9 of the future
What do Mozilla Thunderbird and K-9 Mail have in common? In addition to both being open source email applications, they are both tremendously long-lived applications. Mozilla Thunderbird was released in 2004, while K-9 Mail followed five years later, in 2009. That’s a combined 31 years of experience with mail clients.
The difference is that Thunderbird has been ignoring mobile for decades, while K-9 Mail was launched as one of the first third-party mail clients for Android. Now, their paths cross after the K-9 Mail development team announced that they are joining the Mozilla Thunderbird project to turn the app into the first mobile version of Thunderbird.
According to the K-9 blog post, talks between K-9 and Mozilla began in 2018. Now, K-9 belongs to Mozilla so that donations to K-9 will go to the Mozilla Foundation. At least part of the K-9 team has been hired by Thunderbird to continue development of the future email client.
K-9 Mail will be transformed into the future Thunderbird for mobile little by little, including new features such as the configuration with a Thunderbird account, improved folder management, message filters, synchronization between mobile and PC and more new features. When the modernization of K-9 Mail -which is starting to show over the years- reaches an acceptable level, K-9 will be renamed to Thunderbird for Android. Existing K-9 Mail users will be able to follow the app as it is now while this “update” takes place, which, at this time, we don’t know how long it will last.
Via | AndroidPolice
