So… I’ve used K-9 email for as long as I’ve used Android phones. It was getting flaky on my old phone, and now it says the app was designed for earlier versions… it’s obviously not been updated in a while.
Any suggestions of what email client to use?
I used k-9 because:
It let me send “from” the account name of my choice, which wasn’t usually the underlying account that physically manages the email. (I buy service from a company that supports using my own domain, but I’m not actually hosting my own email, or whatever the right details are.)
It showed email from my main account and also from two gmail accounts all on one handy inbox
It was free, and once upon a time was well-supported
It didn’t do anything weird, like hide some of my email from me. My gmail-using friends seem to miss emails they wanted to see all the time because gmail didn’t think that email was important.
I know the gmail client fails on the first and last of those. Well, unless it’s changed a lot since I last tried it. Anyone have any other recommendations?
Anyway, K-9 complains that it was developed for an older OS, and might not work. But I can still install it, and weirdly, it still makes all the “top email client for android in 2020” lists. So I guess I’ll keep using it for a while. Too bad it’s on the way out, as it’s not clear there’s anything as good to replace it.
I just use gmail and haven’t really looked at the other options.
As far as missing email that gmail didn’t think was important, by default it wants to split your email into “primary” important emails vs “social” or “promotional” emails, but that’s just a default. You can just have one inbox where it shows you all your (non-spam) emails.
I don’t have a lot of experience being logged into multiple gmail accounts on my phone, but it was my impression that while composing an email, you could pick from any of your logged in accounts to be the “sender.”
As far as I know, there is no way to show the emails from multiple accounts in one handy inbox though, unless you have one account auto-forward all emails to the other (which is what I do).
I have 4 email accounts, and one of those accounts has lots of sub-addresses. I bought my own domain. So in addition to the 3 gmail accounts, I can send from things like mail@lucy.com, for family, merchants@lucy.com for commercial transactions, and voter@lucy.com for political things that will be funneled to a “probably spam” folder that I only look at if I’m expecting something I care about to land there.
But while I own the domain, the "from"s aren’t real email accounts, they are all really the same. The Gmail app won’t let me spoof the from to be from my domain. (The domain is real, and stuff sent to it is sent to the underlying email account.) I guess maybe it also won’t put all of those (except voter, which is diverted) into one handy inbox. I can also look at the inboxes separately, but on the phone I mostly look at the “unified inbox”.
I found it shortly after I made the switch to Android, and was looking for a mail client that could deal with multiple accounts and Exchange servers, and not annoy me.
It’s not free. But the cost wasn’t so high that I remember it, and it does most of what I want, including showing an aggregated inbox for my accounts, being smart enough to send replies from the correct account, allowing me to swipe to archive messages or to move between messages, etc.
I haven’t actually used Nine on Google mail accounts - both my work and personal accounts are on Exchange servers - but I assume it can handle them.
Nine also handles contact management, calendaring, etc.; more or less covering the major features of Outlook, to the extent that the underlying accounts’ servers support. However, I prefer other programs (like aCalendar) to do things like showing personal and work calendars simultaneously.
Yeah, that was one of the ones that I saw when I searched for “best email clients”. And it was one of the more promising options.
I’m willing to pay something. The calendars &c seemed like a downside to me, because I don’t want it to mess with that (I’m quite happy with Business Calendar as an interface to my underlying google calendars) but it sounds like I don’t need to hook it up to that. I do want it to talk to my contact list, of course.
I don’t have any exchange email except for work, and I keep my work and personal stuff separate. But I do have both Gmail and an account that I like to access as POP3 (although I could access it with IMAP. Maybe I’ll move t that going forward.)
Since K9 isn’t supported any longer, I will eventually need to move to another app. Thanks for the vote of confidence.
For whatever it’s worth, I wouldn’t worry about the calendars/tasks/notes functions in Nine. The functionality is there…but it’s never struck me as being “in the way”, as I have other apps that handle that functionality better (or at least better-for-me, since I’m extremely particular about calendaring/task lists).
Is there any way to tell Nine to use my google contacts? I suppose I can rebuild a list of contacts, but that seems like a huge PITA.
(Note that my primary email has a completely unpopulated contact list, too, which I’d like to ignore. But one of my gmail accounts owns all my contacts.)
I found a help item that seems to let my phone’s contact app see Nine’s contacts, but that’s backwards – I want Nine to see my phone’s (aka my gmail’s) contacts.
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Never mind, it seems to be working now. Weird, but computers are like that. This app might be good enough.
Yeah, my employer’s exchange server won’t talk to nine. I got a “this is the right password, but your administrator won’t let this thing connect” error message when i tried.
I may not be able to have it spoof my from address as well as k9 did. There’s only one real login for several addresses in the same domain, and that may just not work. I suppose i can set different “reply to” addresses, which is clunky, but will probably work well enough.
Despite a gazillion app reviews saying it doesn’t talk to Google calendars, it seems happy to link to business calendar, which is my calendar app. Not that i need it to talk to calendars at all… But it seems to.
I guess i get a two week trial. I’ll probably buy it.
Hey, is there any way to turn off the “picture of sender” thing? I don’t have pictures for most people, so it’s just a colored letter, and is pretty useless. And i find it ugly.
Settings > Appearance > Sender Image. There’s a switch at the top.
Thanks for making me look. I also find them annoying. However, the images/letters do make convenient places to tap when selecting multiple messages to mark read or to archive.
And yes, the circle was a convenient target for that, but it seems to let me tap&hold, and then tap to select additional ones. (Weirdly, if I tap&hold a second entry, it selects the range. But there is a way to just pick several items to delete or mark read.
Now, if I can just get it to let me send email from two addresses that actually point to the same place, it will do everything important.
I am using the Gmail client for my phone as I did for my last one. I have set up 2 Gmail accounts and 1 each Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a selection in the menu to display all inboxes at once. I find it a little slow loading all these accounts at once but I have been generally satisfied.
And now it’s not doing that anymore. And it’s also stopped BCCing me, and I can’t figure out where to set that. And I realized both those things right after paying for it.
It doesn’t currently seem to be doing anything more than the free gmail client would do. I think I’ll have to keep my broken, out-of-date k9 and hope that someone decides to update it one of these day. It still works okay to send mail. The problem is that it is too old to know how the tell the current operating system “keep me active all the time”, so the system puts it to sleep and I don’t get mail. I guess I can use Nine or Gmail to tell me when new mail comes in, and use K9 to send mail. Which is pretty ugly.
And I realized both those things right after paying for it.