K-9 – An android mutt

Jesse

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t get a T-Mobile G1. That..didn’t work so well. I picked mine up after lunch on release day.

I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with the stock mail client, but I had no idea how….not ready it was.

The total dealbreaker for me was that it didn’t have keybindings for simple things like delete.

“No problem. I’ll just build a patched copy and submit the changes upstream,” I thought. So, I dusted off my Java, hauled down the SDK and the source for the core Email application. Once I got it to build, it was really only about 15 minutes of fiddling around until I could reliably crash the application on the emulator by hitting the delete key. 5 more minutes and I had what I wanted.

…and then I discovered that the Email application doesn’t yet know how to propagate message deletion back to an IMAP server.

15 more minutes of hacking and that, too, was sorted out.

The moment of truth arrived. I tried to install it on my phone.

No go.

It turns out you can’t replace system applications.

So, I did what any self-respecting hacker would. I complained about it on twitter….and then I registered for the Android Marketplace. It took 5 minutes and cost $25.

I set up a google code project, checked in the ‘Email’ app’s original source code and started in with a regex-shaped chainsaw. When I was done K-9 was born.

While I hope to eventually get some fixes contributed back to the core Android ‘Email’ app, I want to get a bit of active development going on a more usable mail application right now. And yeah, there’s a bit of me that’s curious about how the community is going to handle forked bits of the core Android platform. If you’d like a commit bit, just ask.

Right now, K-9 has reasonable keybindings for message lists and individual messages as well as the delete fixes I mentioned. I’ve released 3 versions in the span of 6 hours. It’s been downloaded by about 200 people.

Tomorrow, I expect to add a setting to let me set an always-Bcc address….unless one of you beat me to it.

K-9 – An android mutt

16 thoughts on “K-9 – An android mutt”

  5. God I wish someone would do this for the iphone mail client and other apps. so many basic glaring omissions that could be fixed with 15min hacking if they bothered.

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    1. The glorious new googlephone comes with a kind of incomplete email client. I downloaded the source code, hacked in some features I wanted and then published my version to the google/android equivalent of the iPhone App Store for other people to download and install on their phones.

      Does that make more sense?

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  9. Apparently I get an unlocked G1 for xmas (although they’ve apparently been delayed in customs so they won’t get to London until at least when I get back there anyway) so I expect I’ll be doing some hacking on it next year too.

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  10. Anonymous says:

    My Google search wiki comment on post at androidinmymobile.com

    A brilliant example of the power of open source.

    After having listened to Tmobile customer “service” insisting that the problem with the certificate error was that “G1 doesn’t support corporate email” — even after I was very kindly telling them that this is a bug or at least a design flaw that has nothing to do with corporate email, I luckily found this with a simple Google search “g1 email setup not trusted server certificate”.

    Excellent work!

    And leaves only the question: Where can I send my PayPal-thanks?

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