# Thunderbird - The Eagle Has Landed!

![[assets/thunderbird.png]]

_It's taken years for Mozilla to land this bird onto Mobile. Finally Thunderbird (the mail client) has  perched itself onto Android._

**Written By:** Geovian\
**Date:** 20 October 2024

## Introduction
I have been watching the email client space on Android for over a decade now. There's not much to tell really. most of them are good I have no problems with using them. But being a Linux devotee in that same timeframe, I had been using the Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client on both Linux and Raspberry Pi, hoping that I could one day use something similar to that on the mobile. That day finally arrived a few weeks ago.

Many people had been badgering the good people at Mozilla to create a Thunderbird email client for mobile. I remember about a decade ago this dialogue going on, so it's not a new discussion.

By 2024, the momentum had ramped up. Thunderbird development was taking off. The interesting thing is that Thunderbird is modelled heavily on the K9 Mail client. This is an obviously connection as the Thunderbird team acquired K9 back in 2022 with the intention of transitioning K9 into Thunderbird, which is what happened.

## The Detail
The beauty of the Thunderbird client was that it was a number of different functions all rolled into one system. We had email, a contact manager and address book, an integrated calendar, and task manager. Plus all the various plugins that could be integrated into the system.

![[assets/thunderbird_biz.jpg]]

Now in Android you can get those separate functions on separate apps. At this stage Thunderbird team have not got around to integrating all four functions into the one app. That would be a bit of work, and I'm not so sure that they'll get around to doing that anyway. as they have publicly indicated.

So the email client has landed, and the core of it is very much K9. Really, only the branding elements have changed. The Thunderbird team have relented under customer pressure and the K9 email client will still live on. There will be two ongoing development streams.

So if you use K9 or have used it, then you'll be very familiar with its appearance.

Like any good Android system, the integration across apps such as Address Book and Calendar is pretty smooth and streamlined. I also use the Ete-Sync app to keep all my emails, contacts, calendars and tasks all synchronized. I could have easily have used Google tools for this purpose but I've deliberately kept well away from Google because of their ability to dragnet one's data from their devices without their permission.

## In Summary
As a long time user of Thunderbird within the Linux space it's good that I finally have the same branded email client for Android even though their purposes between mobile and desktop are vastly different.

The Thunderbird team have encountered many hoops and hurdles in the development phase over the last five to ten years just in the desktop environment alone. It wasn't helped by there being so many iterations of the Android operating system (we're now up to AOSP 15.0) so just trying to find a break in the weather so to speak, was always going to be a challenge.

Thunderbird is here now for those that want to try it on your mobile. It is available on both the Google Play Store and Zapstore.