K-9 Mail or FairEmail

Privacy Questions
1

Which one do you use and why?

2

I’ve never used or tried 3rd party mail clients for… Android?

Any particular reason why wont you use the first party app? Are you by any chance using other mail services like mailbox.org with no first party client?

3

Yes, I’m using mailbox.org.

1 Like
4

K-9 Mail imo because it’s going to be thunderbird soon. And fairemail’s developer is pretty dramatic.

5

Copy paste from my other post because I think it’s applicable

Other post

Sure its still using gmail, but other app are still very a good upgrade over gmail app. I use failmail and

  • no ads
  • multiple account, combined view
  • tracker beqcon/image not loaded by default. Can load only image or tracker and image.
  • link confirmation on click
  • openpgp/smime for those that care
  • code/fingerprint required when opening app
  • full of other customization. This is just the beginning.

As for k9, ill check it again in tje duture when mozilla get more stuff done and complete their branded k9 as “thunderbird for mobile”

Otherwise, I agree with @anon35626300, indeed fairmail developper seems to have an opinion on a lot of things. You can understand by reading multiple topics in the dicumentation page. The app has more features than k9 but its sometimes overwhelming. The other way around is… K9 does not have enough feature and setting for me. What really kept me in fairemail is the blocking of tracker beacon.

6

Please take your time when writing on the forum, it’s really hard to read when something is written like this.

7

Let me correct this. Juat finished the disco tutorial

8

K-9 Mail is written in Kotlin (64.5%) and Java (35.4%).

FairEmail is written in Java (58.6%), C++ (34.5%), etc.

In my opinion K-9 Mail being written in only memory safe languages gives K-9 it an advantage in terms of security.

Both clients don’t have reproducible builds on F-Droid, but I’m not sure on K-9 Mail developers stance on this, meanwhile I’m pretty sure that FairEmail developer isn’t interested in publishing a reproducible build on F-Droid:

9

I prefer FairEmail by quite a margin - it’s much more powerful with many more options, and once I got it configured the way I want it’s a dream to use.

That being said the biggest knock against FairEmail is that there are so many options that it takes quite a bit of time and thought and iteration to get it to that perfect configuration. The settings pages can be overwhelming and aren’t always logically laid out.

Also, I’m keeping my eye on K9 to see how the Thunderbird team updates and improves it.

1 Like
10

K9
it has all I need

Fairemail has much more I don’t need. To much…

An app sould be: simple and stupid

2 Likes