Goodbye K-9 Mail
30 comments
·February 27, 2025BrenBarn
I got a chill of dread when reading the headline and the beginning of this, but it was nice to see that in the end the reason he chose to leave the project was precisely because he felt like it now had a stable future and it wasn't all relying on him. I've used K-9 Mail for many years and hope it remains usable for many more. Thanks for all your work. :-)
metalman
I stoped reading and went and checked for updates, which there was one, the changed the UI ,so that the one little frustration I had, is fixed:), and whew! eh, no need to change plans on email. Then finnished reading the post.
leotravis10
That could still happen.
I would watch their development closely considering to me, they'll likely leave K-9 Mail in the dust once Thunderbird on Android gets completely stable. It would be a sad end to one of the only true open source email apps left and with him gone, they can initiate it if they want to.
pbhjpbhj
I did't know what MZLA was exactly, Wikipedia says:
"The Mozilla Foundation supports and leads the Mozilla project, which develops Firefox, Thunderbird and [...] has two taxable subsidiaries: Mozilla Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation."
gostsamo
Mzla is the entity that houses the tb project. TB and ff are administratively separated and the two corps are the physical manifestation of this fact.
walterbell
Hopefully this separation means Thunderbird will not require user email content to be licensed for AI, as Firefox now requires.
lxgr
Do you have any details on this? Sounds pretty concerning if true.
Kwpolska
[citation needed]
ninalanyon
How does this work with regard to the GDPR.
NoboruWataya
That was an interesting history of the K-9 app. Personally I've always been a user of The Other FOSS Email App (FairEmail), but I keep a close eye on how Thunderbird for Android is developing and it's great to have (at least) two solid FOSS choices in this space. Kudos to this dev and hopefully the great work he has done is continued by the team there.
neilv
Why did there need to be a targeted release date for a re-branded open source project release, to the point that it stressed out the team?
* Was there very small runway for a number of salaries that were now needed?
* Were there enterprise sales contingent on a delivery date?
* Did they purchase a Superbowl ad?
* Were there suddenly managers, with OKRs and KPIs?
(BTW, I'm a happy K-9 user, on and off, for 15 years. With breaks for iPhones and other experiments, before coming back, and currently using K-9 on GrapheneOS. Kudos to the author and other K-9 contributors for their work.)
tristor
I was not involved in this project, but I have previously worked at Mozilla (although I left over 3 years ago). Maybe I can share some high level insights for how these things are approached.
Generally there are specific feature expectations when new platforms are added, and it can be a fairly major work. Besides rebranding, there are likely UI changes for look and feel, as well as specific capabilities expected across all platforms that were probably missing. Project deadlines tend to be soft deadlines rather than hard deadlines, but they are created to provide a point to work back from and define scope, and the goal is always to hit the deadline for release. Every day you don't release is a day users don't get access to the work you've put in.
I seriously doubt Mozilla purchased a Superbowl ad or otherwise had financial reasons to set this deadline.
vzaliva
Is android K-9 Mail in any way relayed to Symbian K-9 Mail?
cycomanic
I don't want to disparage the great work that has gone into k9, but it's really unfortunately that the jmap support never went beyond the proof of concept state. I'd really love some mainstream client support for jmap.
daneel_w
Thank you kindly for the work with keeping K-9 light and efficient.
42lux
I loved the app and hated the icon with a passion. All the best. :)
jinnko
It's a reference to Dr Who.
Nux
Heavy user of k9. Thanks for your work!
pbhjpbhj
Oh no! K-9 Mail is awesome, what a great job you've done. Thanks so much.
Good luck with your next steps.
readthenotes1
"The months leading up to the release were quite stressful for me. All of us were working on many things at the same time to not let the targeted release date slip too much. We never worked overtime, though. And we got additional paid time off after the release "
I'm kind of curious what the source of the stress was. It clearly wasn't being overworked.
pavon
I don't know the nature of their deadline, but when I've been working to meet a deadline that couldn't be moved for legitimate reasons, not being approved to work overtime made the stress worse not better. Something I made and cared about was going to ship broken because I couldn't fix the problems quickly enough. Weekends were spent trying not to think about everything I could be doing on the project right now.
ninalanyon
Perhaps you only develop easy stuff. There were plenty of days when I was wrung out long before I had worked the regulation 7.5 hours.
sverhagen
Not working overtime (beyond, say, 8 hours a day), doesn't mean you're not getting swamped during the time (8 hours) that you are working.
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nisegami
Sounds like there was a lot of context switching involved? I can see how that would be stressful.
LostMyLogin
Judging by their passion for the project, I imagine just the idea of releasing it was stressful.
My earliest contributions to opensource is probably k9mail. I was still early in my undergrad, and wanted to get my feet wet in the opensource space, and to prep for google summer of code. K9 mail was my choice since the community (cketti) was friendly, and accommodating.
I started implementing the long-press events to handle image/attachment menu options. My PR wasn't upto snuff, but cketti was kind enough to clean it up and merge it. They even put my handle in the commit logs. Looking back, I probably wasted their time with my PR, but they were gracious enough to not complain, and gave me credit.
I still fondly remember those days and nights building upto the pr, and then refreshing the commit log page to see my handle show up.
I hope cketti finds happiness with whatever they do next.