 A few months ago, it was announced that the Thunderbird guys are going to be taking over the K9 email client on Android. Now I don't do a lot of Android content on this channel simply because I'm more focused on Linux on the desktop, but this is a topic that has caught my interest. And I've been thinking about it now for basically since the announcement was made and I've been cautiously optimistic that this is good news. Now the reason why I've been really interested in this is because the email client situation on Android is kind of similar to what it is on the Linux desktop. There aren't that many good ones. Now the reasons why those are the same situations are different. On Linux itself, the email clients are just kind of all over the place and have UI problems and development problems and stuff like that. I've settled on Thunderbird on the desktop. It's by no mean my favorite choice, but it seems to be the one that works the best. On Android, their problem is completely different in that they have tried different ways of monetizing a lot of applications when it comes to email clients on Android and their solution seems to have become offering a subscription for a lot of the features. Now I'm not opposed to paying money for software. I'd much prefer to hand the developer $30 upfront or something like that and just use their application forever instead of having to pay $50 a year for an email client, which I will not do. So the situation on Android when it comes to email clients is not all that great. Now canine itself has been around for a very long time, maybe even since the beginning of Android, and it actually is a very good email client. If you can get past the fact that the UI is kind of bad. Now that that is a thing that I've never been able to pass. I've never really cared for the UI. So I've always had to look elsewhere for an email client. Recently they've had a lot of different changes after they've made this announcement that it's going to transition to Thunderbird in 2023. The developers behind Thunderbird are now working towards making canine better and they've actually put in some really nice features, things that are kind of commonplace in other email clients. So today what I wanted to do was talk about where canine is right now and where it's heading and kind of celebrate the fact that there's going to be a really good open source email client on Android, something that, while has been true because canine's there, that thing is getting better and that's going to make me really happy. So first let's talk about some of the features that they've recently added. And the big one is they've recently added swipe actions in your inbox. And this is a big one for me because I triage all of my email. I am very proud of inbox zero. I try to zero out my inbox every single day. I will not be very happy with myself if I don't do that. And the way it was in canine before was that you either had to select the email from the inbox or you had to actually enter the email in order to actually interact with it. So you can move it, you can delete it, anything like that, without having to select it one by one and then pressing a button. It was a two-step process in order to actually delete something from the inbox. So now if you want to, you can actually swipe on a message to delete it or archive it or move it or mark it on Reddit. If you want, you can set up two different swipe actions and that is amazing. Now again, that's something that a lot of email clients have had in the past. It's new now to canine and that is wonderful. It's actually something that I could probably use. I could probably get past the UI problems that I've had with it in the past. Now that it has this feature, I could probably use it. So that is a big one. Now you can actually see what I'm talking about here in this animation. And this is in version 6.4 and it's actually works really well and you can choose what swipe actions you want left and right and that's really nice. They've also begun to make the UI much better looking. It was very old school in the past. Now it looks much more like it fits in with the rest of that your applications, which is actually really nice. Now when it comes to what's coming up in the future, the next thing that they're going to be working on is the redesigned version of the mail view. Now this is not out as far as I know. It may be in one of the betas, but basically what they're working on is making it so that the message view, which looks like this right now, looks more like this. Now as you can see, it has the message and then the sender, but it doesn't have a lot of information here. But if you look at the new one, you're getting a lot more information and it's more modern, like I should say, I guess is going to be the way to describe it. They've added several new UI elements, which is their goal here is to make the UI more functional and better looking. So they've introduced swiping gestures, which you've already talked about. They've added color coding to the sender and receiver. So the bylines are going to actually look like they have some color coding. They've added organizational labels. Now, I'm not sure if these labels are going to be tied in with the label system on like Gmail or whatever. From what I can tell right now, these are going to be simply K9 specific or Thunderbird specific in the future features. So that's really cool. So that's the next thing that they're working on is the improved mail view. And that's coming in a beta very soon. Now, when it comes to other stuff that they're working on, they have a very extensive roadmap here of things that they're actually starting to implement and that they want to get done in time for this to be called Thunderbird sometime next year. So they have the improved conversation view, the improved set up synchronization between Thunderbird on mobile and Thunderbird on the desktop, OAuth support, which is already done, swipe between messages, which is already done. They're going to be working on simplifying the settings, which is good. Honestly, I've been playing around with K9 as it is right now and the settings are kind of sparse. So I'm assuming that they're probably going to fill that out a little bit, which is good. As I said, they're working on syncing support, the tags which we saw before. I think that the tags in the labels are at the same thing. I'm not actually sure. They're working on filters, which K9 doesn't currently support and they are working on overall UI and UX improvements. So as you can see, they have a plan. Now, if you're paying attention to the desktop version of Thunderbird, you'll know that they have a major redesign coming next year. In version 105, 107, something like that, I'm not sure what the version number is, but they're working on the UI and they're going to completely revamp it. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how they kind of put those things together if they try to make them look similar and act similar and have similar features. I'm assuming that the Thunderbird for Android is going to be a little bit behind when it comes to features simply because they're going to have to build those features and that's going to take some time. Whereas Thunderbird on the desktop is fully featured and has all the stuff there already. They just have to redo the interface. So yeah, the Thunderbird on Android is really interesting to me because I want an open source email client. I think that it would be wonderful to use that and now that it has swipe actions, that's one step closer to me being able to use it. I really hope that they continue to work on the UI because it's still not quite as good as the email client that I use right now, which is Spark, but it's getting closer. And I like to see them making progress because like I said before, the mobile email clients on Android are for the most part kind of bad for varying different reasons. So I'm just kind of really excited about this. So if you have thoughts on Thunderbird for Android, leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mass.net and Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash linuxcasts. Links for Liberapay and YouTube are also in the video description. If you want to support me there. 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