26 comments

  • Tepix17 minutes ago
    I’m using subadressing, would be lovely to have a mobile app that is aware of that and fills it in automatically and also lets me edit/pick the subadressing part of my email in the from field.
  • emaro1 hour ago
    I'm on Android, but tbh I'm quite happy with Thunderbird mobile. It's not fancy, but generally works well. Though I'm not an email junkie on mobile, mostly use it to check some info like MFA code, magic link etc.
    • anotherpaul33 minutes ago
      Me too, I just want to read my emails sometimes. And it works.
  • crossroadsguy14 hours ago
    I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.<p>Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:<p>&gt; Designed for growth<p>Love it. There&#x27;s no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila&#x2F;Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
    • domh13 hours ago
      Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can&#x27;t remember if it was a protonmail limitation or a Thunderbird one that meant I had to pre-add any email addresses before I could send any messages from them though.<p>Now I&#x27;m on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.
      • basilikum8 hours ago
        The Thunderbird from field is free text. You get a warning about your server having to support it though.
        • domh7 hours ago
          Ahh yeah it was probably a protonmail limitation then. Or maybe needing to manually add to both proton and Thunderbird was the friction I remember.
      • pluc9 hours ago
        If by &quot;input box&quot; you mean &quot;drop down list&quot; and by &quot;anything&quot; you mean &quot;any of my account&#x27;s configured email addresses&quot; then yes.. but FastMail doesn&#x27;t just let you put anything in the From field - on the web or Android as far as what my subscription shows me.
        • domh7 hours ago
          It definitely does for me in both web and android. You can setup specific hardcoded aliases for routing purposes but I have a wildcard&#x2F;catchall and I can put anything in the From when I compose or reply to an email.
          • pluc6 hours ago
            So by &quot;anything&quot; then you mean &quot;anything under a domain I have a catch-all configured&quot;, which makes sense since you&#x27;ve proven you own that.
            • domh6 hours ago
              Ahh yes. Anything in the user section of the email, not the domain. This was not possible to do on protonmail.
    • phyzome6 hours ago
      The only other client I&#x27;ve seen that in is Claws. (Which is part of why I still use it, despite the various warts.)
    • jaksmit14 hours ago
      what does being able to edit the from field enable you to do?
      • fodkodrasz11 hours ago
        My usecase: I have one email account with multiple aliases.<p>I added it to iOS mail with the main alias. I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more &quot;neutral toned&quot;, also one I&#x27;d expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...<p>Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.<p>I report a bug in the app, and the way it happens: it throws up an email editor, with debug info attached to a partially pre-filled form mail. However if its sender is not the alias I set up at the bank, it will get rejected, and will have to do lots if identification turns etc...<p>Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I&#x27;d need to log in twice to the same account to be able to do this. Also apple mail is a piece of ... modern outlook, to be really rude, so I&#x27;m interested in alternatives.
        • ntoskrnl_exe10 hours ago
          In iOS Mail aliases aren&#x27;t available only with the email providers that you can pick directly on the Add Account screen. But if have an account with someone else and had to add the IMAP&#x2F;SMTP servers manually, you can add an alias in Account Settings -&gt; Email -&gt; Add Another Email.
          • crossroadsguy5 hours ago
            If you have my-personal-domain.tld and you have 57 catch-all addresses then to send mail from them you have to add 57 email addresses in there. People know this “feature”. It’s just not what it is being discussed here.
      • Tepix15 minutes ago
        If you use subadressing you need it to reply with the same address.
      • crossroadsguy5 hours ago
        You can enter any email address in that field:<p>any-user@any-domain.any-tld<p>Can be an alias, can be a catch-all email on your domain. Select the right email account (here, email account ≠ email address) with the right pre-configured credentials and that email will be sent, if not it will fail as it should.<p>It’s that simple and basic feature. But apparently email clients decided that’s not the right way and they make you pre-add every single bloody email address you ever want to use — this is specially painful for personal domains and catch-all addresses, especially the one-off ones.
      • tredre314 hours ago
        The official explanation is as follows:<p><pre><code> If your e-mail provider supports it, Customize From Address allows you to make a one-off minor alteration to your From address without having to create a new identity in Account Settings. For example, if your From address is John Doe &lt;john@example.com&gt; you may want to change it to John Doe &lt;john+doe@example.com&gt; or John &lt;john@example.com&gt;.</code></pre>
      • basilikum8 hours ago
        If you ask me for a contact email I will tell you something like jaksmit5@basilikum.monster. Editing the FROM field allows me to write an email to you.<p>If you ever start sending me spam I can just block that address. Especially helpful with companies.<p>You can also use it for sorting emails.<p>It&#x27;s honestly a basic feature of an email client. Even if you don&#x27;t have your own domain stuff like the plus sign for aliases exists with many providers (or at least with gmail).
        • e12e7 hours ago
          Just noting that the thundermail email service (not to be confused for the app) - allows setting up a limited number of custom domains and subdomains with catch all aliases - so I could move my s.hypertekst.net domain over.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.tb.pro&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;51338950680467-How-do-I-set-up-a-catch-all-alias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.tb.pro&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;51338950680467-How-...</a>
      • drnick110 hours ago
        Use whatever identity you want. A server that you don&#x27;t personally own will not normally allow that however. One more reason to self-host email.
  • drnick110 hours ago
    I have been using K9 for a long time on Android. No complaints. I guess most Apple users will simply use the default email client, which works well and is probably better integrated and has a better UI than Thunderbird.<p>On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email&#x2F;CardDAV&#x2F;CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.
    • starky16 minutes ago
      Standalone email has really been a frustration when it comes to using Linux. I was happy with Mailspring, but it doesn&#x27;t really work with my window manager. Thunderbird does way too much and its default search behavior is unacceptably bad. I&#x27;ve tried a few other clients and been extremely unhappy with them for various reasons.
    • aucisson_masque9 hours ago
      K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck. The ui is clunky but worst of all, the search is bad. Very bad.<p>If you don’t do anything special, that will be enough but for everyone else that won’t do it.<p>If I type ‘repor’ in Apple mail, It will show me all report before I even type enter. And if there is too much, I will then add ‘2026’ for instance.<p>On k9, first you got to type the entire word because it won’t progressively search as you type, but then you press enter and see hundreds of mail so you want to add 2026 ? Too bad. Got to type report once again followed by 2026. Made a typo mistake ? Got to rewrite it all over again.<p>This is just bad.<p>And I’m not trying to diminish the work done by Thunderbirds&#x2F;k9 developer, it’s just that it’s done by unpaid developers and it shows. Things move slowly and just suck at using.
      • saagarjha2 hours ago
        I&#x27;m sorry, are you claiming that Apple Mail has good search? Like, the thing that had search so bad that they had to explain that they had once again fixed search in the latest OS on stage at WWDC?
        • my1231 hour ago
          Things are a lot worse than Spotlight on a number of platforms...
      • brendyn2 hours ago
        Search on desktop thunderbird sucks too. I wanted to find an email with file:&#x2F;&#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar, but it ignored the non latin characters and still couldn&#x27;t find it. I gave up and grepped the mbox archive instead.
      • Denatonium9 hours ago
        Isn&#x27;t a lot of that just the suckiness of the IMAP protocol? Mozilla is pushing to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, and they&#x27;re planning on using it in their upcoming Thundermail hosted email service.
        • simfree8 hours ago
          Having to retype the search phrase is just a plain old ux bug
        • smallerize6 hours ago
          No, it starts by searching the emails that it has loaded locally first, and then there is a button if you want to search on the server.
        • loufe7 hours ago
          I get this, but most email is through Google and Microsoft in NA, at least, neither of which seem to care to support JMAP at all, on fact they are getting locked down more and more.
      • smallerize5 hours ago
        I don&#x27;t understand how scrolling is so bad. There&#x27;s some kind of frame-in-a-frame effect where both frames try to scroll at the same time, and it just rapidly blinks one of the scroll bars on the edge.
      • drnick17 hours ago
        &gt; K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck.<p>Is there anything better though?
        • stackghost2 hours ago
          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;email.faircode.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;email.faircode.eu&#x2F;</a>
          • sicktriple52 minutes ago
            I&#x27;m sorry but fairemail has easily the most convoluted UI I have ever had the misfortune to gaze upon in my life. Like seriously what the hell is going on there.
      • fuzzer3714 hours ago
        Why would you ever need to search emails more than maybe a day or two old?
        • Insanity2 hours ago
          Common use case for me is tickets for events&#x2F;activities that have the email attachment as ticket.<p>You buy the ticket some time in advance but then need to show it to enter the event.
        • notabotiswear2 hours ago
          Because as much as I often wish that it didn&#x27;t, the past exists...
    • steezeburger10 hours ago
      Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven&#x27;t set up an email client in 20 years
      • setopt9 hours ago
        I don’t know what <i>most</i> do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps.<p>If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to <i>Mail Accounts</i>, click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.
        • steezeburger9 hours ago
          Oh for sure. Huge assumption on my part. I just feel like 90% of people I work and interact with have a gmail account, and the last 5 companies I&#x27;ve worked at used gmail. I think the last time I setup Apple Mail was for my Grandma so she could see her old Cox account emails and Gmail emails in the same app.
        • wycy8 hours ago
          The default Mail app still doesn’t support push Gmail, does it? That’s the only thing keeping me from using it. I otherwise strongly prefer Mail.app.
          • LeoPanthera6 hours ago
            Mail does support it, but Google refuses to allow it. They used to, in the past.
          • snazz7 hours ago
            That’s Google’s choice, not Apple’s lack of support.
            • DrammBA6 hours ago
              Source? I thought Apple gated XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE so 3rd party accounts on the mail.app fallback to fetch&#x2F;poll.
              • snazz6 hours ago
                Push works with Yahoo and Exchange. Google used to allow it, but stopped (apparently in 2013): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2013-03-26-gmail-push-notification-no-longer-works-with-mail-on-new-ios-dev.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2013-03-26-gmail-push-notification-...</a>
      • siskiyou6 hours ago
        Absolutely not. I see a huge number of iPhone users for in person tech support and most use the Apple Mail app. These are ordinary people who know nothing about pocket computers.
        • DrewADesign4 hours ago
          Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.
        • steezeburger5 hours ago
          Thanks for your data for sure. I used to work in customer facing hardware support, but only have my friends and coworkers to go off of now.
      • josteink1 hour ago
        &gt; Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app?<p>People here are discussing email apps, not Gmail apps.<p>Gmail apps only work with 1 provider (gmail), while email apps works with all email providers.
      • stackghost2 hours ago
        I recently switched from android back to iOS and tried to use mail.app for everything, as I rather like it.<p>Unfortunately it doesn’t sync properly with Gmail. I am in the process of de-googling my life so that’s okay with me. I use mail.app with my fastmail account and it’s perfect.
    • Walf7 hours ago
      Thunderbird for Android is just a fork of K9, after having acquired it. They&#x27;re maintaining it for the foreseeable future.
    • kvuj10 hours ago
      From what I&#x27;ve heard though, Mail has pretty horrible searching in Apple land. Just for that, it may be worth it to look at alternatives.
      • setopt9 hours ago
        It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.
        • Gigachad9 hours ago
          IMAP is a horrifically insufficient protocol. Literally every mail provider just implements their own custom JSON protocol to use with their own proprietary apps. Fastmail created JMAP which was meant to be an open source standard but so far only Fastmail uses it so it&#x27;s just another provider specific protocol and client.
          • brongondwana6 hours ago
            I do think 2027 might be the year that JMAP finally gets wider adoption! Between Thunderbird using Stalwart for their hosted product, and the fact that the new agentic tools are very good at writing JMAP integrations, I expect plenty of much better JMAP tooling.<p>I&#x27;m also close to a much more releasable version of the proxy which was first written back in 2014: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jmapio&#x2F;jmap-perl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jmapio&#x2F;jmap-perl&#x2F;</a> -- which can wrap existing IMAP&#x2F;CalDAV&#x2F;CardDAV&#x2F;Submission infrastructure so you can access it via JMAP.
        • breatheoften7 hours ago
          I use icloud and this does not match my experience ... apple mail search has been insufficient on ios and macos for 15 years or more at this point ...
          • tssva7 hours ago
            I use icloud also and concur. Search in Apple Mail is poor.
    • stackghost2 hours ago
      I bounced off of k9 several times. I could never get it to actually work reliably. I would get an email and never get a notification unless I opened the app to manually check. It was like the bad old days of pop3.<p>Awful, awful app. Fairemail was much better for a power user.
  • eviks3 hours ago
    &gt; Right now, we are focused heavily on getting the core foundations right.<p>Are the core foundations not right in the rejected shared code? Why not fix that instead to get the core right everywhere?<p>Especially if the goal is &quot;ultimate goal is seamless cross-device experience.&quot;, which involves those other apps<p>Otherwise not much to look at, the screenshots are bog (sub)standard designs a lot of email apps have, no polish despite the claims<p>&gt; We’re polishing the essentials: a clutter-free, easy-to-read inbox layout paired with a clean,<p>&quot;from&quot; and &quot;to&quot; and big gaps is clutter, wasting precious space on small even screens (The logos on the sign in screen are also misaligned, but maybe that&#x27;s not a polished &quot;essential&quot;)<p>&gt; modern editor that lets you format messages smoothly without getting in your way.<p>The toolbar design is getting in the way
  • sylens12 hours ago
    If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I&#x27;ll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account
    • saghul9 hours ago
      I tried but got an oauth error :-&#x2F; Hopefully it works soon!
      • brongondwana6 hours ago
        We&#x27;ll look into it! We&#x27;d love this to work for our customers.
  • HumblyTossed14 hours ago
    The Mail app that comes with iOS is plenty.
    • godelski11 hours ago
      I struggle to get it to search things. Even emails within the last few days. It&#x27;ll show me irrelevant mail from years ago but not yesterday&#x27;s.<p>I also don&#x27;t like that it renders PDF attachments. Just seems to be enabling scammers
      • floydnoel11 hours ago
        it&#x27;s also much too trusting of the senders From field. I get emails all the time that look like they come from Apple or a bank, etc. I have to tap the name before it shows the actual from address.
        • godelski10 hours ago
          Yeah that too! I&#x27;ve only had an iPhone for a few years but as soon as I used Mail I immediately understood why my parents got phished. Mail hid all signals people would normally use. Their spam detection is bad too. In my first week I got a PayPal used to buy bitcoin scam and neither Gmail nor Thunderbird showed it (both flagged as spam). Both also just showed it was an empty email with only a PDF attachment whereas Mail showed what looked like a normal email, including an address that looked like PayPal&#x27;s.<p>I also notice it doesn&#x27;t handle relayed emails well. I have a bunch of dummy emails and Mail doesn&#x27;t show me the relayed name, which really hinders my ability to track and combat spam
      • Computer09 hours ago
        I agree, I often find what I am searching for quicker by using the Gmail app instead.
    • radicality7 hours ago
      I wish it could do something what should be seemingly incredible simple task - sync and download ALL the email. But afaik Mail iOS can’t do it, Gmail ios app can’t do it , and no other mail app I tried seems to be able to, which seems absurd.<p>All I want is all the mail and attachments downloaded locally the way normal desktop mail clients work. Not the last 90 days of it (Gmail ios max) - all of it, I don’t care if it’s many gigabytes or more, i just want the full mail, so that something as full text local search of the email would actually work…
      • privacyking5 hours ago
        Preside can. I thought spark could too
    • masenf4 hours ago
      As a daily Mail app user, approximately every 6 weeks, I wish it had the ability to show the full headers and raw message source.
    • hk133713 hours ago
      Yeah, the only thing it doesn&#x27;t do is shared inboxes with Microsoft Office accounts. I would really like to uninstall Microsoft Outlook.
      • zikduruqe13 hours ago
        &gt; it doesn&#x27;t do<p>For a company focused on privacy, I&#x27;d love GnuPG integrated into the mail app.
        • Jaxan13 hours ago
          It does have S&#x2F;MIME, I think?
          • zikduruqe11 hours ago
            It does. But I have used S&#x2F;MIME maybe a handful of times in my career. Whereas, GnuPG dozens of times a day, and in my personal life.
            • snazz7 hours ago
              Do you use GPG for signing primarily or also for email encryption? Dozens of times a day puts you in rarefied GnuPG air!
              • zikduruqe5 hours ago
                Basically for delivering and receiving encrypted payloads programmatically or manually.<p>And once in a while using it for email. :)<p>You&#x27;d be surprised how much GnuPG is used out in the wild.
        • HumblyTossed12 hours ago
          Oh, that would be awesome.
  • bluescrn15 hours ago
    But why? What&#x27;s the USP here?<p>Maybe there&#x27;s a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn&#x27;t seem to be that, at least not at this point.
    • tiberious72614 hours ago
      It&#x27;s impossible (other than mutual TLS) to do mfa on the native ios mail app without trusting a third party for one of your factors. Hopefully Thunderbird will support it...
    • zmk514 hours ago
      They have a paid email service now. This is likely for that and for other users who want a thunderbird-based, free e-mail client.
  • rmoriz4 hours ago
    Apple Mail completely breaks when you have 100.000+ mails in an IMAP account. Even on MacOS it‘s unusable (search, index) while Thundebird works flawlessly.
    • dreamcompiler4 hours ago
      The Finder on MacOS breaks when it has to deal with more than about 10,000 of anything. The MacOS Finder is chock full of O[n] and perhaps even O[n^2] algorithms that have been there, unfixed, since System 7. Back in 1996, a user with more than 100 files in a folder was unusual, so those algorithms worked fine. Nowadays not so much.<p>Proof: Copy 10k files from one hard drive to another with the Finder (not the same drive; you have to prevent COW). Now do the same thing with e.g. cp or rsync on the command line.
  • astameteo15 hours ago
    I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.<p>Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!<p>So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
    • cromka13 hours ago
      They&#x27;re weird with contributions and fixing old bugs as well, to the point community run patchsets make it a much better product...<p>See Betterbird for reference and their blog posts, it sheds some more light on aforementioned weirdness.<p>Also see other comment in this thread mentioning how you can&#x27;t search for &quot;wedding&quot;. A bug that is 14 years now.<p>At this point I&#x27;m really considering trialing one of those two vibe coded clients recently shown here on HN.
    • Dennip14 hours ago
      Very much agree. I still use it on windows because nothing else seems much better, but there are a lot of things I feel are fairly basic&#x2F;core features that just don&#x27;t work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..<p>- Search - Threads - Windows integrated notifications&#x2F;unread badge - Syncing unread counts in folders - Text&#x2F;Email Editor
      • secabeen14 hours ago
        GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it&#x27;s not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.<p>It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.
        • tredre31 hour ago
          &gt; While a mobile client could do the same, it&#x27;s not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.<p>How long do you imagine it takes to fully index 100 emails? 1000? It&#x27;s likely under a minute even for 10,000. And it&#x27;s work that&#x27;s only done once, they don&#x27;t need to rebuild the entire index every time a new email is added. They absolutely could (and should if they don&#x27;t already) index all locally downloaded e-mails. It&#x27;s bonkers not to do it.
        • xethos13 hours ago
          &gt; While a mobile client could do the same, it&#x27;s not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device<p>Doesn&#x27;t this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) <i>after</i> the battery is fully charged? It won&#x27;t be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won&#x27;t be in the index, but I generally don&#x27;t need search for emails I received so recently anyways
        • amaccuish10 hours ago
          My ActiveSync app does server side search using server side indexes just fine.
        • kev00913 hours ago
          I don&#x27;t know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.
      • cromka13 hours ago
        I would totally use TheBat on Windows
    • SoftTalker5 hours ago
      On linux I read my mail in emacs, and use notmuch for searching&#x2F;indexing. It&#x27;s amazing.<p>On the go I use a web browser on my phone for gmail or outlook. No apps. I try to minimize doing email on my phone because it&#x27;s so awkward to type.
    • pizza23414 hours ago
      I use it as well, and it&#x27;s a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.
      • p-e-w14 hours ago
        It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.
    • riedel14 hours ago
      Thunderbird desktop has the expression-search-ng addon that is notoriously breaks on updates. Wonder why the team does not make search a priority cross platform.
    • vangreen15 hours ago
      I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?
      • jdoss14 hours ago
        I have used Aquamail <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aqua-mail.com&#x2F;android" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aqua-mail.com&#x2F;android</a> since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It&#x27;s been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn&#x27;t buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.
        • aucisson_masque9 hours ago
          &gt; $99.99 for a lifetime license<p>Yeah, just a small hiccup. I can buy a whole phone with a hundred dollars.
      • pmontra10 hours ago
        K9 with the old interface, the original one.<p>I picked K9 among the other clients because of that interface so I was in that 50% of users that were pissed off by the new UI. Luckily email protocols did not change and I can still sideload the APK on all my devices.
      • riedel14 hours ago
        I use k9&#x2F;thunderbird for private mail. But for my org&#x27;s on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)
      • warrantisall13 hours ago
        I use ProfiMail on Android. Loving the app since Symbian era. K9Mail is ok too.
      • karussell14 hours ago
        Isnt K-9 Mail supposed to join forces with Thunderbird? K-9 Mail works fine for me.
        • riedel14 hours ago
          Thunderbird for android is K9 just rebranded afaik.
        • ilvez14 hours ago
          Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc
      • jamapy15 hours ago
        I use FairEmail in Android.
  • isaachinman7 hours ago
    For those seeking a non-profit alternative that syncs between iOS and Mac OS, give Marco a try. We support proper offline-first behaviour and instant push notifications, among many other features.<p>I built this for myself out of frustration with Apple Mail and cover all operational costs. Privacy and speed are two of our most important pillars.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marcoapp.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marcoapp.io</a>
    • eahm7 hours ago
      You might have the best intentions but why the hell would I sign up for a service that does what email&#x2F;IMAP does in the first place?<p>Hosting is expensive too, free forever is another question in my mind.<p>Don&#x27;t people remember what email IS anymore? Make me understand.
      • DrammBA6 hours ago
        &gt; why the hell would I sign up for a service that does what email&#x2F;IMAP does in the first place?<p>I don&#x27;t know nor use the app promoted by GP, but in general the problem with apple is that they don&#x27;t support the standard email&#x2F;IMAP push, and only some 3rd parties have approval to use the non-standard apple email push (Fastmail I think). So people have come up with ways to get around apple&#x27;s arbitrary restrictions.
        • al_borland6 hours ago
          I recently switched to Fastmail. When I was asking an LLM about using it with the native Apple apps, it mentioned this approval that was needed, and that it didn&#x27;t always work. I&#x27;d be interested to hear some first-hand experiences.<p>My dad has been using his own domain for email for about 25 years and has bounced around to various hosts... random hosting providers. He uses Apple Mail and hasn&#x27;t ever mentioned having an issue. Though I&#x27;m unsure if he uses push of fetch. I guess I always assumed he was using push, but maybe not.
          • brongondwana6 hours ago
            It&#x27;s pretty reliable. I&#x27;m actually quite amazed that it&#x27;s been this long and Apple hasn&#x27;t opened it more widely. We just happened to be in the right room at the right time to get a custom contract with Apple to have a signing key. The underlying tech is in a couple of open source projects.<p>Of course we&#x27;re all hoping that clients move to JMAP at some point, where push is first-class citizen and we don&#x27;t need the very custom hack that Apple uses to receive pushes right now.
            • al_borland5 hours ago
              That&#x27;s good to hear. There&#x27;s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the Fastmail app to get started, which has been working great and the migration tools worked really well. Once I&#x27;m fully migrated I may want to set up the native apps for some added OS integration.
        • trinsic26 hours ago
          There is a reason why the 3 big three are trying to phase out web&#x2F;email standards, lets let them control the open web moar.
      • rekabis4 hours ago
        &gt; a service that does what email&#x2F;IMAP does in the first place?<p>Haven’t dug into this yet, but are you saying it isn’t a pure eMail client? That it’s a service to which you bodily hand off all your eMail passwords, and therefore the keys to your digital kingdom? That it’s someone else’s computer that’s retrieving your eMails for you?<p>Holy shite, how _stupid_ are people?<p>Like, holy MiTM exploiting, Batman. I would <i>NEVER</i> hand off eMail access to a third party. That’s begging to have your entire online existence destroyed.
  • pmkary14 hours ago
    I don&#x27;t get why Mozilla&#x27;s designs are so ugly. It&#x27;s 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don&#x27;t want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.
    • WD-4214 hours ago
      I don’t understand people complaining about Firefox UI. It barely exists. There’s a url bar with some buttons in each side. If you use vertical tabs, another bar with tiny icons for each tab.<p>There’s so little chrome I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just grey, out of the way, as it should be.<p>Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;1I4gG22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;1I4gG22</a> tell me where the bad&#x2F;ugly UI is.
      • ericpauley55 minutes ago
        The new sidebar design was unnecesary, a waste of space, and the rounded corner cutting into the website is flair with no functional purpose.<p>The fact that I&#x27;ve historically needed to monkey patch the Firefox chrome CSS (and will have to again to remove the unnecessary bar left of tree-style-tabs) would to me imply poor design.
      • squidbeak14 hours ago
        There&#x27;s too much chrome. There&#x27;s no way that I&#x27;ve ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
        • fodkodrasz11 hours ago
          There is too little in modern &quot;nice&quot; designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.
      • godelski12 hours ago
        I&#x27;m with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I&#x27;m pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn&#x27;t notice. I&#x27;d wager 80% of HN users.<p>It&#x27;s such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.
      • browningstreet9 hours ago
        Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t ugly for others. Or will you just not allow others to have this opinion?<p>It’s ugly.
        • preg_match8 hours ago
          I think his point is that, even if you think it’s ugly, the nature of a web browser makes it irrelevant. The web browser is a window, 99.9% of the surface area goes to the website. Which is <i>good</i>. We <i>could</i> have prettier browsers which showed off more chrome, but that would be bad because we want to see the website.<p>Also, the UX of most browsers is basically the same. Browser UI has converged on one layout that works, and Firefox has it. It’s really indistinguishable from chrome.
      • moolcool13 hours ago
        I do not like the vertical tabs at all
        • WD-4213 hours ago
          Good thing you don’t have to use them.
        • froobius12 hours ago
          Counterpoint: vertical tabs are way better
          • koolba12 hours ago
            Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.<p>But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
        • godelski12 hours ago
          I don&#x27;t like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. <i>They aren&#x27;t even the default</i> so wtf is the point of your comment?
      • dawnerd13 hours ago
        Have you seen the new Nova theme? It’s horrible, especially with vertical tabs.
        • WD-4213 hours ago
          I took the screenshot with the nova theme enabled. That’s what it looks like. It’s a nothingburger.
          • Eric_WVGG12 hours ago
            If that screenshot is of the Nova theme, then the Nova theme is very ugly.
          • dawnerd12 hours ago
            That’s not how it looks in mine at all.
        • AuthAuth4 hours ago
          Nova looks great
        • fodkodrasz11 hours ago
          Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won&#x27;t distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.<p>edit: just checked, and the most disgusting thing the extra internal horizontal top border of the text contents of the tab titles got removed. Still ugly, but nor instant Alt+F4... now I can bear it until I find about:config.
    • F3nd013 hours ago
      Remember when Mozilla did a huge rebrand that introduced a new logo many people actually loved for its ingenuity, styling their name as moz:&#x2F;&#x2F;a? [1] And then, not very long after, they did another rebrand that resulted in… whatever they’ve got now? [2] Taking a step forward and then two steps back seems like a very Mozilla thing to do.<p><pre><code> [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;opendesign&#x2F;arrival&#x2F; [2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;mozilla-brand-next-era-of-tech&#x2F;</code></pre>
      • NoboruWataya13 hours ago
        Here&#x27;s the HN thread about the rebrand that &quot;many people actually loved for its ingenuity&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13425380">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13425380</a><p>There is some praise but it&#x27;s mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it&#x27;s awful, I can&#x27;t believe they&#x27;ve done this, millions wasted etc.
    • layer813 hours ago
      Looking at the screenshots, I don’t have a problem with the aesthetics of the UI, but with how it’s wasting a lot of space. It feels like we could see more content on a small 4” smartphone screen 15 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.idownloadblog.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;Rainn-Wilsone-inbox.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.idownloadblog.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;R...</a> (and that already felt a bit wasteful back then, where a different layout could almost double the number of items visible at once)
    • maxloh13 hours ago
      You know what? We also have people complaining about the new Firefox UI redesign, which is exactly the whitespace-heavy style you found in Arc or Dia.
    • copperx13 hours ago
      &gt; some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous<p>With all due respect, what a low bar for beauty!
      • edukite12 hours ago
        I&#x27;ll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I&#x27;m at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It&#x27;s mediocre at best
    • vallerie13 hours ago
      Zen is delightful to use, and based on Firefox. I just don&#x27;t get what&#x27;s going on at Mozilla.
      • godelski12 hours ago
        Most people don&#x27;t like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I&#x27;m a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don&#x27;t know how to navigate. Which is understandable<p>What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
    • the847212 hours ago
      They&#x27;re tools. I expect BM 085232, not the Book of Kells.
    • yuhmahp14 hours ago
      was wondering the same. Mozilla seems out of touch
    • hk133713 hours ago
      I don&#x27;t care for the Material Design, even when Google did&#x2F;does it.
    • xyst13 hours ago
      To parent commenter, &quot;beautiful design&quot; just means &quot;AI powered browser&quot;.<p>A quick glance at their product and its literally just a clone&#x2F;fork of chrome&#x2F;chromium with AI-pilled features.<p>&quot;Beauty is in the eye of the beholder&quot; holds true.
  • josh_carterPDX8 hours ago
    When I first saw the link, I thought, “Oh cool! A new platform using the Thunderbird name!”<p>Then I realized it was Mozilla’s app. And just like that, the excitement was gone.<p>I try not to bad-mouth products, but Thunderbird and I did NOT get along. Clunky integrations, a painful Gmail connection, and basic functionality issues made it one of the worst email clients I’ve ever used.<p>Of course, I’m also annoyingly picky about my tools, so maybe it’s a me problem.
    • acheong088 hours ago
      Interesting. So far, Thunderbird has been the only mail client that &quot;just works&quot; for me. Then again, I self host my email &amp; so no weird Gmail or Outlook bullshit.
  • ChrisArchitect14 hours ago
    Suggest keeping &quot;A first look&quot; in the title for clarity that this isn&#x27;t a full release<p>Title: Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look
  • leobg11 hours ago
    Should be: 2006.<p>(Not the headline. The announcement. Haha)
  • rekabis4 hours ago
    This still has some pretty glaring bugs.<p>On <i>any</i> desktop system I am able to have it connect flawlessly to any of my IMAP accounts.<p>On iOS, the exact same settings produces an auth failure, and I cannot move past account set-up.
  • HideScore12 hours ago
    why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there&#x27;s IOS app, maybe.
    • godelski11 hours ago
      Mostly because I have multiple email addresses. But I make good use of the filters (which could be improved) and tags. That really helps with searching through everything.<p>If I only had one email account I probably wouldn&#x27;t care as much but that&#x27;s not as common these days
      • QuackyTheDuck2 hours ago
        What stops you from using these multiple addresses within iOS Mail?
    • ptnpzwqd12 hours ago
      Juggling multiple e-mail accounts in a single client, and I haven&#x27;t found anything better - also haven&#x27;t really had any major complaints, the desktoo app works perfectly for what I use it for.<p>What alternative do you suggest?
    • pmontra9 hours ago
      On my desktop, because I download my mail, store it on my laptop, backup it. Nothing is left on the servers of my email provider.
  • atrokhymchuk15 hours ago
    apparently that is a native iOS application, I wonder whether they tried to use KMP to use same codebase with the android app
    • crossroadsguy14 hours ago
      I have seen this. Some devs actually write a pure swift ui app and still manage to make that look like anything but a pure switt ui app. Since the mothership is Mozilla I won&#x27;t put is past them.
      • cosmic_cheese14 hours ago
        Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It&#x27;s one reason that I&#x27;m not particularly fond of it.
    • markstos12 hours ago
      Thunderbird for Android is based on the 15+ year old K-9 Mail app while Thunderbird for iOS is a greenfield project.
  • mmmnnn12 hours ago
    i feel i could die waiting for this. i am 54.
  • mococa9 hours ago
    Are you guys using emails?
    • browningstreet9 hours ago
      About as often as I check my physical mailbox.<p>Magic login links tho…
  • linuxkernal10 hours ago
    Now does it come with that oh so annoying &quot;Sent from my iPhone?&quot;
  • basilikum13 hours ago
    But can it do IRC?
  • CJefferson15 hours ago
    It&#x27;s been 14 years since I reported you can&#x27;t search for &quot;wedding&quot; in Bugzilla, have they ever fixed it, they hadn&#x27;t last time I checked:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=752844" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=752844</a><p>(The bug is they do &#x27;clever matching&#x27;, so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can&#x27;t say &#x27;just show the word I ask you for&#x27;)
    • janci14 hours ago
      Yeah, the search in Thunderbird never worked for me, so I use the quick filter. Apparently it does not use the index (and is slower), but it works.
    • michelb14 hours ago
      That thread is both hilarious and sad. Incredible that nobody has forked the project simply to implement a working search.
      • cromka13 hours ago
        Betterbird exists actually and they fix bugs like that, which Mozilla just refuses to address for whatever reason
      • copperx13 hours ago
        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterbird.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betterbird.eu&#x2F;</a>
    • NoboruWataya13 hours ago
      If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched &quot;wedding&quot; and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the &quot;Wed&quot; results.
    • dpkirchner13 hours ago
      Well, they are funded by Google after all -- infamous for replacing or ignoring search terms entirely.
    • encom11 hours ago
      Many such cases. Duckduckgo is practically unusable because it just decides for itself which of my search terms it actually searches for. I have to explicitly quote every word to get it to function like a search engine.<p>Meanwhile, Netflix search (on Apple TV at least), is not only practically unusable, but literally so. Doesn&#x27;t matter what you input, it just returns a random selection of films. I saw Kill Bill the other day, and wondered if there were any other Tarantino films on there. &quot;Tarantino&quot; returned things like Indiana Jones and other completely nonsensical results.<p>Am I the only one around here who knows SQL?
  • godelski12 hours ago
    [dead]
  • ls-a13 hours ago
    [dead]
  • sneilan110 hours ago
    What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can&#x27;t vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a &quot;first look&quot;. What am I missing that is so exciting? I don&#x27;t understand what is going on here that is so neat. There&#x27;s nothing here I can&#x27;t pump out in a week or two at worst.<p>I&#x27;m confused at everyone&#x27;s excitement because it&#x27;s become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren&#x27;t up to speed with modern practices, it&#x27;s helpful to have an iOS app.<p>Am I talking like the guy that dissed Drew Houston, saying oh I can put together sshfs and a couple other things and build out Dropbox. Drew rightly corrected the engineer on ycombinator many years ago to say that end users want a finished product not a bunch of tools.<p>But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.
    • comboy10 hours ago
      Have you vibe coded any apps that you use daily?<p>In my experience I spent a lot of time on design nowadays. It turns out I did that in the past too I just had quite a lot of time to think that through slowly while hands were doing vim stuff. And good design is hard. And somewhat subjective. But mostly just hard, pretty sure in some time agents will get better at it, but for now it&#x27;s still something they can&#x27;t do well at all.<p>And by design I mean all of it: UX, look and architecture.
    • rm44510 hours ago
      An e-mail client is the archetypal demo-in-a-weekend, ten-million-lines-in-production program. Not to deny the power of coding agents, and maybe you can vibecode something that&#x27;s just right for reading <i>your</i> e-mail, but does it support <i>my</i> nested MIME folders and the obscure encryption used by my mail host?
    • spreiti9 hours ago
      I am confused by your comment. Is it modern practice to vibe code everything these days instead of installing an app developed and maintained by a team? Do you expect everybody to be vibe coding their own software now?
    • yreg10 hours ago
      There&#x27;s much more to a good app than the code.