I use K9 for a small LLC, and would like to support the developer. My CPA advises that anonymous[1]/charitable contributions are not tax deductible business expenses. However, if the recipient publicly acknowledges your sponsorship, it's considered an "advertising" expense.
To accept contributions from small corporations using your app, consider offering a low-friction non-charitable service such as a one-year placement on a "sponsors" page of your website, like (the Python Software Foundation does this for contributions of any amount. [0])
Another option could be an annual per-user license (for organizations large enough that the person with a credit card wanting to support you cannot also influence the advertising budget.)
If you're a solo developer, don't forget small businesses when considering how to raise funding!
Fully agree. Nobody is going to ask about me purchasing a monthly license or a monthly recurring advertisement slot with company money. But monthly donations are a PITA with regards to taxes and you run a risk of having to pay taxes on them as if they had been pure profit.
So give me a way to "purchase" and I'll be happy to donate.
I understand it's difficult for a company to give money to an open source project. But none of the options you've mentioned sound very appealing to me.
GitHub displays the avatars of sponsors. Maybe that's an option that satisfies the "acknowledges sponsorship" criterion?
https://github.com/sponsors/cketti
You could also sell access to some "extra documentation". It doesn't have to be particularly useful or add any value at all, it just has to be there. You could probably go as "far" as just writing a two-page rundown of IMAP or something. Maybe even put it online for free and sell access to a PDF. The point is there's a tangible "benefit".
This does not apply solely to taxation, but also what is an easy sell to management.
All of this is extra administrative work that understandably you don't want to deal with, but it may open the door to significantly more sponsorships, so it could be worth looking into.
PSA: if you've not used it in awhile, use the betas via F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.fsck.k9/ You have to click "Versions" from the F-Droid app and specifically opt-in (and upgrade) the betas, F-Droid will default to installing the older stable version.
The betas are almost night (mode heh) and day apart, the UI and operations have almost a complete overhaul from the old days and it looks (and works) really great on my Android 11 device. This isn't K-9 Mail on your T-Mobile G1 anymore, it's a brand new day for the betas.
Thanks for the pointer - much improved indeed! I was getting the impression that development had ceased and never knew that F-Droid doesn't always install the latest available version.
Oh wow the beta looks nice. I'll test it and donate if it's something I'll change over to. Currently I use FairEmail, a Dutch opensource project done buy a local guy. It's good but it has some nuances and way too much granularity for my taste.
This comment fails to mention that the beta versions are totally fucking broke in many ways and don't even do IMAP IDLE. There's a reason they are still in beta.
Your salty demeanor is misdirected at the messenger, and that issue is literally the top bullet item on the developer's blog post as what the money will support to get coded. Be nice.
K-9 is a really great mail app for android! In my opinion it's the best app if you want to use a custom SMTP/IMAP server instead of using a solution like hotmail/google/etc.
It also has PGP support (with the help of OpenKeyChain to manage certificates) that works great! There are no other well known solutions for applications supporting PGP in Android; this is huge.
People that either want to avoid walled gardens or need proper encryption to their mail need to support this project!
> the best app if you want to use a custom SMTP/IMAP server instead of using a solution like hotmail/google/etc
IMHO, it's also the best if you're using Gmail: Google has been breaking its UIs for years (both on the app and on the web), especially for people like me who try to use proper quoting and signatures, or to send plain text emails. Apart from some glitches with reflow, K-9 does that very well even with Google as email provider.
I can't compare against Microsoft products since I've never used them on mobile, but seeing how horrible Outlook is on the desktop for plain text emails (and that's not an hyperbole), I bet K-9 is better as well.
jesus christ gmail is absolutely unusable both on the desktop and on mobile.
the only way to make it usable again is to switch to the plain html mode, that uses no javascript, loads very fast, and reminds me a lot of the first gmail ui, back from ~15 years go.
Injecting non-google code inside my gmail window sounds like a very dumb idea to me, honestly.
I already trust google very little and keep my gmail inbox because I'm basically being coerced/forced to (no gmail = no apps on android)... The last thing I want is adding another entity to the picture.
Imagine if they just used an SSE or mixed-replace to update the plain html version in real-time when messages are received without JS. But we can’t have that (Google even unilaterally disabled mixed-replace in blink/Chrome/Chromium (except for continuing to support MJPEG) many, many years ago so no one else can do that either).
One thing that confuses me about iOS devices is when a gmail account is added to the mail program. It isn’t clear if it is adding SMTP/IMAP or if it is doing some web app type configuration and if that gives Google more access to track device activity.
This sounds like the modern OAuth-based sign-in flow (for IMAP and SMTP connections, authenticated by OAuth).
This helps avoid app-specific passwords when you use 2FA, and lets users use their regular sign-in flow (which could include enterprise SSO, TOTP, U2F key etc).
I imagine that there's the ability for Google to set some cookies as part of that process, although knowing Apple, would not be surprised to learn they had sandboxed that instance of the browser, to prevent cookies persisting into regular Safari.
That one supposedly has source code available under GPL3 but despite GPL3 clause 9, which says "You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program", presents the GPL3 as an EULA and refuses to run unless the user clicks "I agree".
"I agree" is presumably shorthand for "I agree to the linked license", or in other words "I agree to the GPL3", or to expand that, "I agree that I am not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program". Since that's part of the GPL3 text.
I can't be any less of a lawyer, but that sounds OK to me. One is not required to accept the license merely by virtue of it's having been published under that license, but this is surely compatible with the author adding extra conditions to run their program if they so wish?
The copyright holder is not bound by the license granted to others, so in general is legally permitted to add any additional restrictions. However, as this particular additional restriction is not one of the additional restrictions that GPL3 section 7 permits, section 10 applies to anyone other than the copyright holder, which states "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License." This is a problem for e.g. F-Droid's package, which is neither distributed by the author nor distributed in accordance with the terms of the GPL.
Not by me. The developer is, as far as I am aware, not doing anything illegal, and while F-Droid technically are, the developer as the copyright holder is the only one who could possibly take any action against it and is, I would expect, happier with F-Droid doing what they are doing now than with patching out the EULA acceptance screen.
I didn't know of this one, that looks really nice! Do you know why they chose to start over when K9 already existed for a long time (it says copyright 2018-2021 on the website), or is it a fork?
FairEmail was made from scratch, and has modern (from the ground up) sync logic, that works well with modern battery saving measures in Android. Push mail by default, and low power consumption during sync. I believe it actually works better than Gmail (which has the advantage of Google's push infrastructure) - FairEmail just uses IMAP idle (where possible).
K9 originated in the old android AOSP email app, and I think the developer of FE wanted to cut loose from that and build it according to newer design patterns.
>It also has PGP support (with the help of OpenKeyChain to manage certificates) that works great! There are no other well known solutions for applications supporting PGP in Android; this is huge.
As a caveat here, at least in the non-beta version, support for PGP signatures is intentionally crippled because the original author dislikes them and apparently wants to push encryption (eg, https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/2375), ignoring everyone who points out that this feature may be important or required by policy for them. By default, PGP signatures on unencrypted emails are silently hidden and the emails are displayed as being unsigned. There is no way to sign emails by default, and trying to sign an email results with a popup telling you not to.
For clarity, the author doesn't like unencrypted but signed emails. Which strikes me as weird but at least it isn't something that people would normally do. They are OK with encrypted and signed emails and presumably encrypted but not signed emails. Here is the rationale:
I think there are implementations out there that don't let you send encrypted but unsigned messages (anonymous encrypted). This stuff seems to bring out the enforced opinions in people.
I'm a little miffed that this comment has a better explanation of "why I should care about K-9 Mail" than anything I could find from deliberately looking for that information on their site. The "about" page just talks about the team, and their blog posts, even the one "what's up with K-9?" just talk about release schedules.
The features are listed, but they're not clickable for further details.
Things like "light and dark theme" could show screenshots. In fact, I can't find any screenshots at all on their site, except for the one on the front page.
Have you looked at the beta versions yet? The UI was overhauled over basically the last 1.5 years and the points mentioned in the blog post are the bits missing to release that as a stable version (IMAP IDLE mostly): https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/releases
I've been running the betas since more than a year without any problems whatsoever. (If you don't need push obviously)
Thanks for the tip, the GitHub release makes a real difference compared to the outdated version on the Play Store. It's sad that there is not many reliable email client alternatives to GMail that works with custom server.
> I definitely struggle to understand why IMAP IDLE is critical for a release.
The functionality is present in the latest stable version, but needs to be reimplemented in the new version. As a user I would be upset if the app was updated and that feature taken away, even if it was only temporary.
I am not using the beta version of K-9. I was able to make it work mostly correctly on Android 11 by setting it to "Not Optimized" in the battery power permissions. That will allow it to run in the background. It seems to be able to use IDLE and to also run its periodic polling that way. Otherwise I would open K-9 and it would be hours out of date.
What's a minsdk force? I know what minsdk is but the sentence doesn't compute for me
Edit: oh, randomly spotted this:
> A major factor was the API level requirement by Google Play. It required us to make changes to internals of the app in order to be able to publish updates via the Play Store.
I don't get the problem. Why not do a release? If google doesn't want the hard work and updates yet, fine, you can still tag a new release and people can use f-droid, download the apk, whatever right? (I'm using it via f-droid, thought most people would be doing that since it's an open source client with graphics from the 2009, the kind of thing you only use as foss fan).
Does this also mean older devices are forced into obsolescence? Since this is minsdk and not maxsdk it sounds like it, but there's still many apps that run on my 2018 device with Android 7 (and even 2012 device with 4.4) so that can't really be.
No, they aren't linked. Maybe you are mixing it with compileSdk, that and targetSdk are usually linked but minSdk is almost always considerably behind.
Installed it from Github, it wanted me to pay for putting a colour on my account(??) and it will remind me of something something.
Nah man...don't do that if you actually want to sell a pro version. Just state it upfront and I will consider it. putting it in while I'm already adding an account and letting me read some long list of features I won't have if I continue right in the middle of the configuration is a dark pattern to me.
Developers get very little say in what version F-Droid builds and ships [1]. I think there are some very minor differences between the F-Droid build and the regular (open source) build when it comes to OAuth API keys - centralised mail providers often don't agree to the keys being used in those builds made by third parties.
> Nah man...don't do that if you actually want to sell a pro version. Just state it upfront and I will consider it.
Not really sure how much more the developer could do here to make it clear - the app description [2] states it contains in-app purchases (at the top). The 5th line of the description says "Almost all features are free to use, but to maintain and support the app in the long term, not every feature can be for free. See below for a list of pro features.", and there's a full list of pro feaatures lower down the description.
Not really sure if I would agree this is a dark pattern as such - I've seen far worse store listings that don't call out "pro" features until you start using the app, and discover 90% of the advertised features are paid.
Maybe I have more sympathy for open source developers, but I think it's getting increasingly difficult for them to compete with the commercial apps that are "free" (with data mining), or are paid. Looking at how regularly updated FE is, and how responsive the developer is, I imagine it could be a monthly paid subscription, based on how much time many people spend using email, and it would probably be more than worth it. Certainly looking at SV SaaS pricing, it feels that FairEmail is probably very much under-priced. And open-source too, so people really are just paying for convenience.
Comparing it with hey's email service + client at 99 USD/year, it's not easy for open source apps to compete, but it's in our collective interest for there to be good, credible open source options available.
I've moved to SimpleEmail, which is a fork of FairEmail. Donated to both though. SimpleEmail ripped out the donation part in their fork, which is their right under GPL, but not a nice move IMO. Main reason for me is the fast pace with which FairEmail was iterating. Often with breaking changes. I like my email app to be boring. Which FairEmail is, thanks.
K9, to me, is just too much options and features. A lot of which needed tweaking and tuning, and were not something one could simply ignore.
FairEmail has (at least for me) reached a point of relative stability now - it's mostly iterative improvements and minor edge case/bug fixes.
Good example, a recent release [1] fixes a couple of bugs that look to have originated from upstream Android projects, and added some new support for removal of "tracking" parameters from Facebook URLs.
I'd agree with your comment that stripping out donations is "allowed", but "not nice" - I can only sympathize with the developer of FairEmail - it is clear he puts a huge amount of time into an app that has no "covert monetisation" like most apps.
I was never particularly happy with other email apps and privacy (especially not the commercial closed source ones which receive your emails on their own server back-end, but keep this part quiet in their description, just to make push easier) - for me, at least, FairEmail delivers the same or better, but all entirely on-device. There's even some basic learning-based on-device support for sorting mail automatically into folders (spam, FYI stuff, etc). That's for me the spirit of FairEmail - doing what others do server-side, on-device, without spying.
But it is clearly a challenge to make money from this, and I think (based on FAQs) that the developer has a struggle with those who think that everything should be free.
No relation to the app, just a happy user that likes to pay for open source apps rather than become the "product".
I don't know, the UI is good. I like the "Ice Cream Sandwich" look, honestly. I wonder if the time of an open-source project is best served by re-doing the UI just to keep up with trends.
I think it's rarely worth the effort, but eventually they're forced into it. I really hate the current mobile software ecosystem. Hope we get something like the xfce of mobile environments at some point where things don't really change for decades.
It really is too bad that the Nokia N800/810/900 series of devices were too little too late, because having what is basically an ubuntu desktop on a phone-screen sized tablet was awesome. Maemo was the original "OS" and was replaced by "Mer" and if i am not mistaken, at least as of 2019 both projects still exist.
If i ever pick up a librephone, pinephone, or something that can be switched to another OS, i'd like to try it again, even though i don't like using phones in landscape mode anymore. Maemo raised the bar so high on landscape orientation user interfaces that everything else is a joke.
This is a very benign and positive UI change tbf. I say that as someone who heavily uses this app since many years and who is _very_ conservative w.r.t. software. I've switched to the beta and am really happy with it. Not just changed, really improved.
What is Material Design and why was it a mistake? It's mentioned as being a part of a "fork" called pep in another comment, and viewing the screenshots it looks like google hangouts does/did.
Too late :) I just updated to the beta after I read about it in this thread. Seems like more clicks to jump around accounts, I have 3. I don't really care though, it's still better than any alternative.
K-9 is one of these programs I use every day, several times per day. And among these programs, one of the (rare) ones that have never needed any care from me: it just works, and has kept working for years.
That being said, there are lots of things that could be improved upon the current release version (especially wrt search), and I understand that just keeping up with the Android ecosystem is not a small task.
I've just set up a small recurring donation. It's more than worth it.
I used K-9 back in my Android days (5+ years ago). It's biggest weakness was, and to my knowledge, still is, inability to support modern OAuth authentication schemes that Google and Microsoft have largely switched to. Sometimes I get a notification from a comment on the GitHub issue still.
It used to be able to connect to Exchange servers, but hasn't been able to for nearly a decade.
What exactly do you need this for? If it's for authenticating with their IMAP/SMTP, app passwords have worked for me with Gmail, even on 2FA-secured G Suite accounts. No idea about Microsoft though.
Exchange administrators usually disable IMAP. K-9 originally was one of the few apps that could still talk to Exchange servers. But it's failed to keep up with the times.
Currently you have to allow "less secure apps" on your Google account to use K-9.
- Support all the major business platforms: Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
- Support email encryption on a one off basis as needed. Nothing fancy just encrypt the email with AES256. Don't worry I'll get the key to the reipient.
Why this would be super successful.
1) It would eliminate instant messaging for most business use.
2) Consistency, simplicity and ease of support.
3) Contrary to popular opinion, 99 percent of business communication is not super secret stuff. It doesn't warrant the complexity of full time end to end encryption. But it is nice to bave it readily available for the 1 percent where it is really needed.
And yes, I have used K9 personally and I will support it but it doesn't begin to meet my business needs.
I think business doesn't actually want Email, it wants NNTP. The semantics are different enough that both models have a reason to exist and complement each other:
- With email you write to a specific address. With NNTP you write to a group. In a business you almost always want to target multiple people, because activity is interesting (and relevant) to many people.
- To solve that we have a hack that is mailing lists; they work, but still only allow people to receive content _if they were in the recipient list from the beginning_. With NNTP the actual users are abstracted from the recipient, which allows people to read content in a group _even in the past_, or unsubscribe from a group and not bo bothered by new content
- Because it is ingrained in the protocol, creating/modifying/removing groups is easy to do, contrary to mailing lists. You don't need a special team to do that. Many times there is some content that needs to include multiple lists, but not everyone in those groups is relevant to the discussion... but you still include the different maliing lists because "that's the people who _might_ be interested". No more CC forwarding ad nauseam.
- Side-effect of having well-defined groups: because groups are more fluid they match better to actual people, and so the groups becomes a good denominator of what the "mail" might be about and whether it is important or not (compared to a sender and 189 random recipients)
Just look at the way the latest business IMs like Teams are working. They might not be perfect but they map much more to NNTP semantics, and have become the preferred way to communicate, even in long-ish form, rather than email.
(They do have one big advantage over NNTP though: message editing)
At this point, if a new software is needed anyway, we might as well ditch email and use a better protocol (even if it is not NNTP)
I think business doesn't actually want Email, it wants NNTP
Or how about just an email client with better support for mailing lists?
The SMTP protocol supports multiple recipients adequately enough --- it's the client software that could stand some improvement to make it easier to apply/use.
I thought it would be sufficiently explained in my message. Mailing lists don't fix that because there's no standardized protocl for creating, modifying and removing them. Moreover even if there was, if a user isn't part of the mailing list but wants to see some message someone needs to forward it. If a message was sent before you joined, too bad, you can't see it.
Everything is just a very clunky experience made with ducktape and handmade scripts for something that can't even do all we want. It's totally normal that people flocked to other solutions.
I've not donated through Liberapay before but this prompted me to donate to k9-mail and in turn after poking around on Liberapay for a bit, I've set up small recurring donations to other OSS that I use (like GIMP).
Not the only one - I started using Nine a year ago, after switching from something else that has been abandoned (I forget the name, but I'd been using it for years because it supported bypassing Exchange security lock down).
Absolutely love Nine - it works marvellously with my own IMAP and SMTP servers, my work O365 etc. And everything in the UI is configurable. I think Nine is actually the only Android app I've ever actually paid for - highly recommended it.
I have licenses for both Nine and AquaMail with the same purpose (operates with work-required MFA via O365+adfs+RSASecureID token) and would highly encourage you to look at AquaMail. If you thought Nine was configurable, hold on to your hat - AquaMail is all that and more, I highly prefer AquaMail to Nine for business email.
I've been using Nine for ages and it's great*. How well does AquaMail work with Exchange / ActiveSync?
(*My only real complaint about Nine is if I try to import more than a few months worth of email history into the local cache it slows to a crawl and starts breaking. I'd pay for an app that locally indexes a few tens of GB of email history and makes it instantly searchable.)
I'm afraid I've never used it with direct Activesync; my Exchange connection has always been EWS/OWA-based (whatever they call the web endpoint now in O365 hosted Exchange).
Absolutely, it works (and has worked) with EWS for me reliably over the years, I've never actually used ActiveSync on my (personal) devices, as that gives my company control (MDM) over my device to remote wipe it. I've used AquaMail for... 8 years? (back when it was just one dev and $5) across all the Exchange movement my company has done.
It did take them (the new owners) awhile to get the O365 MFA support coded in, which is when I purchased Nine and used it for a year or so. Once AquaMail got their code updated to handle that, it was like a breath of fresh air coming back to the client. (the export/import of your settings - which are plentiful - works great, I've also upgraded phones many times)
i recently started getting into selfhosting email and k9 mail was the goto app for android. i first got the f-droid version but switched to github beta version and the experience has been awesome
Is there an equivalent for iOS? I'm currently using Outlook, which does all the basic stuff very well, but I'd like something a bit more "power user"...
FairEmail puts some of it's features in a pro version only. Which is fine, I support developers getting paid to work, but in this case I would rather help crowd fund K9 which can offer these features to anyone - whether they can pay or not.
I remember using K-9 when I got my first (or second?) Android phone. I don’t remember the exact version, but it was probably pre-ICS. I do remember that I liked it a lot.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, I tried the app again and was disappointed at how it looked basically identical to the last time I tried it. Seeing that, I just assumed it became abandonware.
Does this fund raiser mean I was wrong, and the app was always under development, or that it was recently revived?
The release version is from 2018 but I just found out about the beta version in this thread, which looks more modern, not sure how modern though, just about every app I use looks different, so I'm not sure what today's standards are. I've been using it for at least 5 years without much issue.
I've been using K-9 since forever, maybe since 2011 if it's as old as that. I don't need any new feature, all I need is that it downloads mail from POP3 accounts. Manual pull only, customers already send me push messages on Slack ;-)
Still I'm donating some money because I want that it keeps working on new Android versions.
I was running local mail on my main machine called "Brainmachine" after a computer in the old 1960s Dalek comic strip. Looking around for an Android program to access it, I found K-9. Serendipity.
I wanted to give a quick shoutout to Hey [0] while giving K-9 a potential solution. Hey is fiercely approaching email like no other email client has in decades. It is a fundamental shift in the way we interact with email. For anyone who hasn't tried it, you're missing out on what email can be. They have a free trial but it isn't free nor is it ad supported or backed by a VC, which brings me to the point about funding. You shouldn't be sorry about charging your customers or feel only if some investor would give you money all your problems would go away. I gladly pay for Hey because it solves a real problem elegantly, sure it's not perfect, I still have to have my gmail on the side as sort of a backend to my email experience, but the problems it solves are well worth paying for. So if K-9 provides real value where no other email client provides the same level of value then their users should be more than happy to pay for it, I know I would. But if it provides some esoteric feature like PGP where even those who use it don't really know why they do and most certainly would not pay for then sure maybe you do need outside funding.
While I really enjoy Hey, I think a $99 per year price tag is insane. You‘ll likely use your email for tens of years to come, so that‘s multiple thousands of dollars for a software that doesn‘t need to change. Running a mailserver isn‘t expensive, either. It could as well be an email client with a one-time payment, in my opinion. Would I pay $99 once and use it with my existing providers? Sure! Would I pay yearly and switch all my emails so that I am basically trapped inside a subscription? No...
Running email isn't expensive neither is breathing air while walking to work, but that misses the point. They had to build a product to make email less crazy that has real value and it takes massive effort and creativity.
If the developer is checking this thread: take a look at the Brave Creators program. If you have an account there I will gladly add you to my list of regular contributions. Brave userbase is growing in and millions of users are receiving BAT which can them be used to support developers and content creators.
To accept contributions from small corporations using your app, consider offering a low-friction non-charitable service such as a one-year placement on a "sponsors" page of your website, like (the Python Software Foundation does this for contributions of any amount. [0])
Another option could be an annual per-user license (for organizations large enough that the person with a credit card wanting to support you cannot also influence the advertising budget.)
If you're a solo developer, don't forget small businesses when considering how to raise funding!
[0]: https://www.python.org/psf/donations/ [1]: https://liberapay.com/about/