K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android

The open source Mozilla Thunderbird email client has a long and storied history, but until now that story has been limited to the desktop. This is about to change, according to a Thunderbird blog post. Thunderbird is coming to Android through the popular open source mobile email client K-9 Mail.

According to Thunderbird’s Jason Evangelo, Mozilla has acquired the source code and rights to the K-9 Mail name. K-9 Mail maintainer Christian Ketterer (known as “cketti”in the OSS community) will join the Thunderbird team, and eventually K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android.

However, Mozilla will invest money and time into the development of K-9 to add a few features and quality of life improvements before that happens. The blog post lists these markers on the feature roadmap:

• Account Setup with Thunderbird Automatic Account Setup
• Improved folder management
• Support for message filters
• Synchronization between desktop and mobile Thunderbird

Once certain development milestones have been reached and K-9 Mail has been satisfactorily brought “in line with Thunderbird’s feature set and look and feel”, K-9 Mail will be renamed Thunderbird. The blog post does not define a specific timeline for this transition.

The FAQ on the Thunderbird website answers some questions about what features can be included in the mobile app, why the team chose not to create a new app from scratch, and so on.

Mozilla Thunderbird was first launched under the name Minotaur. But the email client known as Thunderbird dates back to 2003. It was conceived as an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox browser. But over time, Mozilla’s focus has been on Firefox, especially as webmail applications have become more dominant.