The default mail client on my MyTouch4G dings. A lot. It makes me friggin' batty with all of the dinging that it does. Once it gets a message, it persists in telling me about it until I do something. It will do this all night long if I don't remember to put the phone on silent. In addition, the default client periodically deletes all 7 of my e-mail accounts. These things made me a very unhappy camper and set me to looking for a replacement.
Everything I read said that K-9 mail was the perfect solution to my problem, so I tried it, at the very low price of FREE. After the great reviews, I was willing to pay for the thing, so the free price was a bonus. I installed K-9 and set up my 7 accounts and hoped that I was on the road to e-mail nirvana. Unfortunately, nirvana remains a good distance away.
Things that work:
* I was able to hide the combined mailbox. I like segregating my email accounts, so see no need for a combined folder to clutter my view. Some people may want one. Giving people the option is a good thing.
* It is quicker than the default client, at least with my IMAP account. Maybe I finally got the account set up correctly, but it works a lot better in K-9 than an in any other client.
Things that don't work, at least for me:
* K-9 can't deal with attachments to messages sent from Outlook unless the message was sent in plain text format. I am not able to ask my clients and opposing counsel to re-send things in plain text just so that I can read their attachments. This one failure completely ruins K-9 for me. However, the developers MAY be addressing this in their next major revision.
* Dogs can't count. K-9 does a good job of notifying me of new mail, but always has the wrong number of messages in the notification message. This is a minor niggle, but it is something that they should look at.
* No widgets. I got really used to the default mail client having a widget for each of my two main accounts with a little number on top of each one telling me how many messages are unread in each one. K-9 lets you put an icon for each account on your phone, but it doesn't do anything but take you directly to that account.
* It just doesn't feel right. The default mail client felt natural to use. K-9 feels like a kludge.
When I discovered that K-9 did not support attachments, I went back to the default mail client for a while, but then realized that I only needed that for attachments, so am using K-9 primarily, with the default client set up to access, but not automatically poll, accounts so that I can get messages with attachments and download them as needed. Like I said, using K-9 is a kludge. This whole e-mail problem just makes Android look bad.
UPDATE: When I finished writing my review, Amazon displayed ads for some other products that I might like. One was Maildroid, which intrigued me. I read some reviews and decided to give it a try. It is a great product and I have now paid the $18 for the Pro version (unfortunately, I had to get it from Google, as Amazon does not sell it) and dumped K-9 entirely. Maildroid "feels" right. It took about 30 minutes of tweaking to get it set up exactly how I like it, but that's not bad with 7 email accounts. Bye bye, K-9.
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Screenshots
Latest updates
What's new in version 5.208- Various bug fixes
Product Details
Release Date: 2011
Date first listed on Amazon: March 15, 2011
Developed By: K-9 Dog Walkers
ASIN: B004JK61K0
Customer reviews:
857 customer ratings
857 customer ratings
Developer info
Product features
- E-mail client with highly customizable search, filing and account set up options
- Clean layout features elegant e-mail summary and reply options triggered by a long-press
- Program supports IMAP, POP3 and Exchange (with WebDAV)
Product description
K-9 Mail is an open-source e-mail client with search, push email, multi-folder sync, flagging, filing, signatures, bcc-self, mail on SD & more!
K-9 supports IMAP, POP3 and Exchange (with WebDAV).
K-9 is a community developed project. If you're interested in helping to make the best mail client on Android even better, please join us! You can find our bugtracker, source code, mailing list and wiki at https://github.com/k9mail/k-9
We're always happy to welcome new developers, designers, documenters, bug triagers and friends.
You can find K-9's release notes at: http://bit.ly/new_k9
K-9 supports IMAP, POP3 and Exchange (with WebDAV).
K-9 is a community developed project. If you're interested in helping to make the best mail client on Android even better, please join us! You can find our bugtracker, source code, mailing list and wiki at https://github.com/k9mail/k-9
We're always happy to welcome new developers, designers, documenters, bug triagers and friends.
You can find K-9's release notes at: http://bit.ly/new_k9
Technical details
Size: 4.5MB
Version: 5.208
Developed By: K-9 Dog Walkers
- Access information about networks
- Open network sockets
- Read the user's contacts data
- Read from external storage
- Read the sync settings
- Get notified that the operating system has finished booting
- Access the vibration feature
- PowerManager WakeLocks to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming
- Write (but not read) the user's contacts data
- Write to external storage
Minimum Operating System: Android 4.0.3
Approximate Download Time: Less than 1 minute
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 16, 2011
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2019
K-9 Mail no longer works on Amazon Fire! Don't waste your time downloading, installing, and configuring it.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 17, 2016Top reviews from other countries
Frank Leonhardt
Android email for the technically literate
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 7, 2019
PaulDDrabble
Brilliant Email App Get It Get It Now!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 3, 2013DP
Much better than the standard Kindle mail client
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 29, 2014TreezH
K-9 Mail works really well
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2013