A new update for the open source Android email client K-9 Mail introduces support for OAuth 2.0. The long-requested feature adds authentication support for Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and personal Microsoft accounts.
K-9 Mail, which will become Thunderbird for Android in the near future, is a popular mobile email client for Android. The app will stick to the original name for now, but will be renamed eventually. New features and improvements will be introduced before that happens to make sure Thunderbird desktop users have a positive user experience.
One of the main issues that users of K-9 Mail ran into was missing OAuth support, as it prevented Gmail from working with the client. Google made OAuth 2 mandatory for Gmail, dropping support for other authentication options.
The new K-9 Mail release for Android addresses the issue. Once updated, K-9 Mail users may once again integrate Gmail with the client to use all of the client’s functionality with their Gmail accounts. The other supported services work with OAuth as well now.
K-9 Mail 6.2 is already available on Google Play and the project’s GitHub website. Users who have installed the email app via Google Play should receive the update automatically, provided that automatic updates are enabled via Google Play. The K-9 Mail listing on F-Droid has not been updated, but this will happen in the near future.
A pre-release version of K-Mail 6.2 was released two days ago. One of its changes “made the transition of existing Gmail accounts to OAuth 2.0 a bit easier” according to the changelog. K-9 Mail users who have configured Gmail to authentication using other schemes, e.g. POP3, need to switch the scheme to OAuth 2.0.
The latest version of the email application adds an unsubscribe action to the menu when viewing messages that have an unsubscribe header.
The full changelog is available on the project’s GitHub website. FairEmail is another popular choice when it comes to free email clients for Android.
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