Android e-mail apps
It is frustrating. K9 Mail / Thunderbird has stopped syncing deleted items in version 12. It turns out that there were several regression bugs reintroduced from around about v8 or so… funny, I have only just noticed this issue a few days ago.
No matter what I try, the deleting of e-mails is not synched back to my e-mail server. This is not a local issue unique to a self-hosted e-mail account; there are several open bugs since 2024 with people seeing the same behaviour with things like Gmail, GMX and others.
I opened a bug report yesterday and within a few hours I received a response. It is a huge bug affecting the entire 12-series app with a fix being pushed through to version 13. I had already tested the beta version — version 13.01b — with no luck, so I ventured a test on version 13.02b. Success! We are back in business. I will have to continue using the beta version until we get a stable release.
This episode started me thinking about the general state of Android e-mail apps. There is no real alternative to Thunderbird from the perspective of someone who is looking for an e-mail client which is (1) privacy-respecting and, (2) not chock-full of adverts.
What I miss — the only thing I miss — from Apple is their mail app. It literally just worked and there was no need to look around for another e-mail app. It was excellent at what it did.
Android? Pff! That’s entirely another story. If you’re on a Samsung device, there is the solid Samsung Email and away you go. When I had a Samsung, the e-mail app also just worked consistently without any issue.
I’m now on a Nokia and I literally have no choice but to stick with Thunderbird. There is not a single alternative which I can point to and say: “this one comes close”. With Google’s Gmail, there is no privacy; the same goes for Microsoft’s Outlook but with the added annoyance of adverts. Over the past few days, I also tested out Edison Mail and discovered (unsurprisingly) that they are hardly privacy-respecting as they claim. And they are also AI-everything now. As soon as I loaded up my account, ping! An e-mail was received, welcoming me onboard. This indicated to me that signing up in the app calls home and triggers the “hello” e-mail. Not cool. FairMail once looked promising but in all my attempts, I could never get it to connect successfully to a single account of mine.
What ever happened to a simple app to receive and send e-mails? Specifically for Android. E-mailing from a mobile device should not be this complicated. I don’t really need a bot to summarise my e-mails for me, thanks. I do lament the lack of simple, private e-mail options available to generic Android users. Bring back Blackberry phones, please!
Whatever will happen if, say, Thunderbird dies? As of today, there would be only one other option, and that is to not use e-mail on my generic Android device.