this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Thunderbird for desktop. Thunderbird for mobile.
Huh. TIL Thunderbird is on Mac. It's not on iOS for whatever reason. I guess I heard it was coming to iOS at some point and figured it just wasn't on Apple in general?
Used it years ago, willing to give it another chance. Mail (by Apple) is fine on iOS, but on the Mac, it could be a lot better. I'm no fan of Outlook, but that's what we use at work, and it makes Apple Mail look so bad. (I'm not going to pay for Microsoft 365 or Office on my Mac. I do not see Outlook as an option for my home computers. I don't like Microsoft software enough to pay for it.)
The android version is just rebranded K-9 Mail, which was a fork of the built in Android mail client from Android 1.0. So there isn't a lot common in desktop and android Thunderbird, it's not a port.
Desktop Thunderbird uses Firefox ESR under the hood, I guess the Mac version is not ported to ios because Apple's limitation on browser engines.
Not just... K-9 and Thunderbird worked together, so that K-9 godt features from Thunderbird and the other way round. True cooperation there.
Yeah, I follow its development, I wanted to emphasize it's not desktop Thunderbird ported to Android, but coming from a different source.
They're working on a version for iOS: https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-ios
I vaguely remember K-9 Mail.
So Thunderbird requires a browser engine? I didn't think an email program was dependent upon a browser. I would expect one that was to be inefficient. Like a lot of people I work with use Outlook inside of Microsoft Edge. And I just look at them like they're crazy. Our workstations are powerful enough that there's not much difference, but why would you do that to yourself? (No, I'm not going to ask them. I don't want to hear their reasons. And it's not really hurting anything.)
Emails are html, a lot of things under the hood are similar, they don't have to reinvent the wheel if they start from a browser. Mailspring (mentioned in the thread) and afaik the new outlook (not outlook classic) are electron apps, so they are just a chromium windows.