Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

A traditional-style rich email client – but for tablets

MZLA, the company behind the Thunderbird email client, is finally putting its mobile email client app into beta testing – but it's a lot more mature than that sounds.

Thunderbird for Android has reached beta testing, and you can grab it from the Google Play Store. A version should follow on the FOSS F-Droid store soon. If you want to build it yourself, the source code is on GitHub.

It has been a few years' wait: the Thunderbird Foundation hired the app's lead developer, Christian Ketterer, nearly two and a half years ago now. But saying that, although it's officially only a beta, the app is considerably more mature than it sounds.

Not because he's had 28 months to work on the app. He has, but that's not the reason: the real reason is that Thunderbird for Android is not a ground-up new project. Thunderbird for Android is based on the existing K9 Mail application, which is 15 years old: it débuted late in October 2008. We installed the beta, and it describes itself as version 8.0b2.

K9 Mail is a well-known and long established email client for Android – in fact, back in 2011 it was The Register Android App of the Week. It doesn't look that wildly different today from those 13-year-old screenshots.

K9 Mail is also the basis of the email client supplied with several de-Googled Android phones. For instance, back around the same time as Thunderbird's acquisition, we also took a look at the /e/ Foundation Murena One. This de-Googled Android phone uses a fork of K9 Mail as its email client. So too does the privacy-centric Punkt MC02 that we looked at earlier this year.

We installed the Thunderbird 8 beta on our Android 14 handset and it worked just as smoothly as K9 ever did. We added Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to it, and it automatically picked up the server config from its database, asked for our OAuth credentials, and that was it.

This is the Android client of choice if you email like a pro. (And if you don't, you should learn.) It can handle proper grown-up style email messages in plain text, complete with bottom-posting. This is of course how the biggest FOSS project in the world is coordinated, on the LKML.

Even those poor waifs weaned on Outlook, "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" as we feel Edsger Dijsktra would have put it, may find use for Thunderbird for Android. For instance, it can aggregate umpteen different email accounts into a single unified inbox. Different accounts are discreetly color-coded with a vertical bar in the subject line. ®