The open source Thunderbird email client has a long history, but so far this history has been limited to the desktop. That’s about to change, according to a post on the Thunderbird blog. Thunderbird is coming to Android via the popular open source mobile email client K-9 Mail.
According to Jason Evangelho of Thunderbird, the Thunderbird team has acquired the source code and naming rights for K-9 Mail. K-9 Mail project manager Christian Ketterer (known in the OSS community as “cketti”) will join the Thunderbird team, and K-9 Mail will eventually become Thunderbird for Android.
The Thunderbird team will invest in finance and development throughout the K-9 to add various features and improvements before this happens. Once certain development stages are reached and K-9 Mail is satisfactorily aligned with Thunderbird’s feature set and visual appearance, it will be rebranded as Thunderbird. The blog post doesn’t mention a specific timeline for this transition.
Naturally, the team invites users to download K-9 Mail and provide feedback on its ongoing development. As the team works on the new roadmap, it is likely that there will be many changes, big and small, to the implementation in the next few months.
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