680080 - Provide mobile client (Thunderbird for Android)

Status: REOPENED

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110817 Firefox/9.0a1
Build ID: 20110817061121

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox for Mobile has been a resounding success and that's going up against many very good competitors, however in regards to email clients, there's a very limited number of competitors available on the mobile platforms and even fewer that pack a real punch. As such, Mozilla should piggyback the hard work that makes the platform so versatile and roll out a mobile (Android) client.

Comment 2

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Reopened, see comment in bug 658570

Comment 3

[nate]

All of the leading mobile clients are propriatary, so Mozilla is obligated to work on this. Porting lightning would be a must and a problem. The UI would need a complete redo.

Comment 4

[Nils]

Best alternative so far seems to be K9 mail, though it doesn't handle (i.e. make easy to use and manage) large amounts of folders (100+) well enough yet.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl=en
http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/
https://github.com/k9mail

...Thunderbird would still be my favorite option if available.

Comment 5

[Paul [pwd]]

I was using K9, however one day it stopped fetching my emails and the developers seem to have no idea why.

Comment 6

[Antoine Turmel [:GeekShadow]]

Gaia Mail (from Firefox OS) should be usable on Firefox Android I guess.

Comment 7

[Antoine Turmel [:GeekShadow]]

also this is a duplicate of bug 658570

Comment 8

[Dave Marshall]

We need a great email app for Android. The app that is pre-loaded on current tablets is bare bones with no option to manage an address book. It can collect addresses from incoming email, but provides no way to edit, add or remove them. K-9 Mail is only slightly better in that it syncs with Google contact list, but has none of its own. I have several hundred addresses in Thunderbird on my computer and would like to have awfully functional email app that actually works. I want Thunderbird for Android. Mozilla needs to raise this "bug" to the highest priority and get it done.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Just to be clear ... there is no progress in blocker bug 788897 nearing 2 years, and this is not in the plans of anyone currently active the community.  When we get postings in support forums requesting this, they are pointed to https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/thunderbird_client_for_android which diplomatically says, "don't count on seeing it".

Comment 10

[anonymoustech]

This was added to the Mozilla Student Projects list (https://github.com/Mozilla-Student-Projects/Projects-Tracker/issues/96) yesterday. Someone should add the "student-project" keyword to also add it to this page: https://bugzil.la/kw:student-project. There seems to be many people interested in working on this project.

Comment 11

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I doubt if this is viable as a student project.

Comment 12

[anonymoustech]

(In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #11)
> I doubt if this is viable as a student project.

Considering no progress has been made in about 5 years, if a student group were to get a start on this project, then other developers might become more interested. They could at least get Thunderbird to build on Android with a basic UI, possibility reusing some of the components of Firefox for Android.

Comment 13

[sujaytandel.proj]

If this student project is still open then, can I work on this student-project?

Comment 14

[Paul [pwd]]

Given all of the work that's gone into Fenix and how modular that is, I think it's a lot easier to do this as a student project. There's a lot less to write.

Comment 15

[sujaytandel.proj]

(In reply to Paul [pwd] from comment #14)

Given all of the work that's gone into Fenix and how modular that is, I think it's a lot easier to do this as a student project. There's a lot less to write.

Okay, I'll get started right away. Could you give me any suggestions/pointers regarding this project before getting starting? It would help me a lot.
Thanks

Comment 16

[Paul [pwd]]

(In reply to sujaytandel.proj from comment #15)

(In reply to Paul [pwd] from comment #14)

Given all of the work that's gone into Fenix and how modular that is, I think it's a lot easier to do this as a student project. There's a lot less to write.

Okay, I'll get started right away. Could you give me any suggestions/pointers regarding this project before getting starting? It would help me a lot.
Thanks
Sadly, I can't give you very many pointers at all. But I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with the work that's being done on Fenix so as that you can figure out what you need to do and what you can simply pull from there.

These links should prove useful to you
Fenix: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix
Reference Browser: https://github.com/pocmo/reference-browser
Android Components: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components
Application Services: https://github.com/mozilla/application-services

Comment 17

[sujaytandel.proj]

Hey Paul,
The project status states that this student project is still open, so can you please assign this project to me?
Thanks for the earlier advice.

Comment 18

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to sujaytandel.proj from comment #17)

Hey Paul,
The project status states that this student project is still open, so can you please assign this project to me?
Thanks for the earlier advice.

I strongly recommend against spending time on this ticket (and this project, broadly defined). It's true that Fenix is modular, but it's modular around Gecko/GeckoView, without support for (most of) XUL. The Thunderbird UI is entirely XUL and doesn't lend itself to "porting". It's true that you could use GeckoView to display HTML emails, but you'd need to build the entire mail client UI as Android widgets -- and nothing that Mozilla has done on mobile will help with that.

Comment 19

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

As someone who's worked on Thunderbird in the past, I'm going to agree with Nick here, this is too large a project for a student. It is unlikely that Thunderbird could be just "ported" to a mobile display. For starters, the UX would need to be totally redesigned, but also I suspect that some/most/all of the mail handling backend just isn't suitable as a straight port. There's more complexity than just take the existing desktop app and build it on Android - you might be able to do that, but I strongly doubt it would be useful.

In the past there's been various discussions on tb-planning mailing list about this, and it would be worth looking those up. From what I remember, a lot of the discussions resulted in discussions about needing to focus on the desktop client to secure that future. In any case, we'd also need this backed Thunderbird developers, and I don't see that happening here. Given that, and the fact this isn't a well-scoped small project that could be done in a few weeks, I'm anticipating the current TB developers and removing the student project flags

IF (big IF) active development on an android did happen, then aspects of it might be a good student project, but I don't think we're ready for that yet.

Comment 20

[Paul [pwd]]

As the person that filed this, while at the time of posting, porting may have seemed a viable decision, what we've learned from Fenix is that there's a better way to do Android and porting isn't necessarily the answer. In fact, I would hate to see a port of Thunderbird, I would much rather see the product name used for a built-for-android product and with all that's available in the above links (AC, AS, etc), I think that it's definitely worth pursuing.

I do believe that this project is too big for a student project. But like the reference browser, I would like to see it at least emerge as a prototype of what Mozilla can do. I believe that a mobile email client can garner far more success than the desktop is capable of at this current juncture of our technological lives. Every smartphone ships with an email client after all.

Obviously Sujaytandel, you should listen to Nick and Mark, as they're more aware of just how much it takes to get something like this to a state of delivery.

Comment 21

[ytrezq]

No as https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/252797/how-to-edit-send-a-previously-sent-gmail-message-as-a-new-one-on-android

Comment 22

[Paul [pwd]]

I think you're confused ytrezq. Clearing request.