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.
On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email/CardDAV/CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.
K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck. The ui is clunky but worst of all, the search is bad. Very bad.
If you don’t do anything special, that will be enough but for everyone else that won’t do it.
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.
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.
This is just bad.
And I’m not trying to diminish the work done by Thunderbirds/k9 developer, it’s just that it’s done by unpaid developers and it shows. Things move slowly and just suck at using.
Isn't a lot of that just the suckiness of the IMAP protocol? Mozilla is pushing to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, and they're planning on using it in their upcoming Thundermail hosted email service.
Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven't set up an email client in 20 years
I don’t know what most do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps.
If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to Mail Accounts, click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.
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.
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'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.
From what I've heard though, Mail has pretty horrible searching in Apple land. Just for that, it may be worth it to look at alternatives.
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.
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's just another provider specific protocol and client.
When I first saw the link, I thought, “Oh cool! A new platform using the Thunderbird name!”
Then I realized it was Mozilla’s app. And just like that, the excitement was gone.
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.
Of course, I’m also annoyingly picky about my tools, so maybe it’s a me problem.
Interesting. So far, Thunderbird has been the only mail client that "just works" for me. Then again, I self host my email & so no weird Gmail or Outlook bullshit.
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.
Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:
> Designed for growth
Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can'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.
Now I'm on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.
The Thunderbird from field is free text. You get a warning about your server having to support it though.
If by "input box" you mean "drop down list" and by "anything" you mean "any of my account's configured email addresses" then yes.. but FastMail doesn't just let you put anything in the From field - on the web or Android as far as what my subscription shows me.
what does being able to edit the from field enable you to do?
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.
If you ever start sending me spam I can just block that address. Especially helpful with companies.
You can also use it for sorting emails.
It's honestly a basic feature of an email client. Even if you don't have your own domain stuff like the plus sign for aliases exists with many providers (or at least with gmail).
My usecase: I have one email account with multiple aliases.
I added it to iOS mail with the main alias. I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more "neutral toned", also one I'd expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...
Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.
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...
Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I'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'm interested in alternatives.
In iOS Mail aliases aren'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/SMTP servers manually, you can add an alias in Account Settings -> Email -> Add Another Email.
The official explanation is as follows:
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 <john@example.com> you may want to change it to John Doe <john+doe@example.com> or John <john@example.com>.Use whatever identity you want. A server that you don't personally own will not normally allow that however. One more reason to self-host email.
If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I'll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account
I tried but got an oauth error :-/ Hopefully it works soon!
The Mail app that comes with iOS is plenty.
Yeah, the only thing it doesn't do is shared inboxes with Microsoft Office accounts. I would really like to uninstall Microsoft Outlook.
> it doesn't do
For a company focused on privacy, I'd love GnuPG integrated into the mail app.
It does have S/MIME, I think?
It does. But I have used S/MIME maybe a handful of times in my career. Whereas, GnuPG dozens of times a day, and in my personal life.
Oh, that would be awesome.
I struggle to get it to search things. Even emails within the last few days. It'll show me irrelevant mail from years ago but not yesterday's.
I also don't like that it renders PDF attachments. Just seems to be enabling scammers
it'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.
Yeah that too! I'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's.
I also notice it doesn't handle relayed emails well. I have a bunch of dummy emails and Mail doesn't show me the relayed name, which really hinders my ability to track and combat spam
I agree, I often find what I am searching for quicker by using the Gmail app instead.
I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.
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!
So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
They're weird with contributions and fixing old bugs as well, to the point community run patchsets make it a much better product...
See Betterbird for reference and their blog posts, it sheds some more light on aforementioned weirdness.
Also see other comment in this thread mentioning how you can't search for "wedding". A bug that is 14 years now.
At this point I'm really considering trialing one of those two vibe coded clients recently shown here on HN.
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/core features that just don't work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..
- Search - Threads - Windows integrated notifications/unread badge - Syncing unread counts in folders - Text/Email Editor
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's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
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.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device
Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways
My ActiveSync app does server side search using server side indexes just fine.
I don't know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.
I would totally use TheBat on Windows
I use it as well, and it's a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.
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.
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.
I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?
K9 with the old interface, the original one.
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.
I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It'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'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.
> $99.99 for a lifetime license
Yeah, just a small hiccup. I can buy a whole phone with a hundred dollars.
I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org'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)
I use ProfiMail on Android. Loving the app since Symbian era. K9Mail is ok too.
Isnt K-9 Mail supposed to join forces with Thunderbird? K-9 Mail works fine for me.
Thunderbird for android is K9 just rebranded afaik.
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
I use FairEmail in Android.
But why? What's the USP here?
Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.
It'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...
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.
I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don'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.
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.
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.
Edit: https://imgur.com/a/1I4gG22 tell me where the bad/ugly UI is.
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?
It’s ugly.
There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
There is too little in modern "nice" 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.
I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.
It'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.
I do not like the vertical tabs at all
Good thing you don’t have to use them.
Counterpoint: vertical tabs are way better
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.
But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?
Have you seen the new Nova theme? It’s horrible, especially with vertical tabs.
I took the screenshot with the nova theme enabled. That’s what it looks like. It’s a nothingburger.
If that screenshot is of the Nova theme, then the Nova theme is very ugly.
No, it isn’t.
That’s not how it looks in mine at all.
Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won'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.
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.
Remember when Mozilla did a huge rebrand that introduced a new logo many people actually loved for its ingenuity, styling their name as moz://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.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-of-tech/Here's the HN thread about the rebrand that "many people actually loved for its ingenuity" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425380
There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.
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: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/R... (and that already felt a bit wasteful back then, where a different layout could almost double the number of items visible at once)
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.
GASP!
> some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous
With all due respect, what a low bar for beauty!
I'll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I'm at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It's mediocre at best
Zen is delightful to use, and based on Firefox. I just don't get what's going on at Mozilla.
Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'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't know how to navigate. Which is understandable
What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
They're tools. I expect BM 085232, not the Book of Kells.
was wondering the same. Mozilla seems out of touch
I don't care for the Material Design, even when Google did/does it.
To parent commenter, "beautiful design" just means "AI powered browser".
A quick glance at their product and its literally just a clone/fork of chrome/chromium with AI-pilled features.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" holds true.
Are you guys using emails?
About as often as I check my physical mailbox.
Magic login links tho…
why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there's IOS app, maybe.
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.
If I only had one email account I probably wouldn't care as much but that's not as common these days
Juggling multiple e-mail accounts in a single client, and I haven't found anything better - also haven't really had any major complaints, the desktoo app works perfectly for what I use it for.
What alternative do you suggest?
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.
Suggest keeping "A first look" in the title for clarity that this isn't a full release
Title: Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look
apparently that is a native iOS application, I wonder whether they tried to use KMP to use same codebase with the android app
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't put is past them.
Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It's one reason that I'm not particularly fond of it.
Thunderbird for Android is based on the 15+ year old K-9 Mail app while Thunderbird for iOS is a greenfield project.
i feel i could die waiting for this. i am 54.
Now does it come with that oh so annoying "Sent from my iPhone?"
But can it do IRC?
It's been 14 years since I reported you can't search for "wedding" in Bugzilla, have they ever fixed it, they hadn't last time I checked:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')
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.
That thread is both hilarious and sad. Incredible that nobody has forked the project simply to implement a working search.
Betterbird exists actually and they fix bugs like that, which Mozilla just refuses to address for whatever reason
If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched "wedding" and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the "Wed" results.
Well, they are funded by Google after all -- infamous for replacing or ignoring search terms entirely.
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.
Meanwhile, Netflix search (on Apple TV at least), is not only practically unusable, but literally so. Doesn'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. "Tarantino" returned things like Indiana Jones and other completely nonsensical results.
Am I the only one around here who knows SQL?
Should be: 2006.
(Not the headline. The announcement. Haha)
What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can't vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a "first look". What am I missing that is so exciting? I don't understand what is going on here that is so neat. There's nothing here I can't pump out in a week or two at worst.
I'm confused at everyone's excitement because it's become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren't up to speed with modern practices, it's helpful to have an iOS app.
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.
But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.
Have you vibe coded any apps that you use daily?
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's still something they can't do well at all.
And by design I mean all of it: UX, look and architecture.
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's just right for reading your e-mail, but does it support my nested MIME folders and the obscure encryption used by my mail host?
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?
There's much more to a good app than the code.