this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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NGL https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.email is a lot better...
And here I thought K9's design looked a decade outdated already
What do you mean? This is perfectly modern. Material UI and minimal, outline style icon theme. That's all the rage with web devs nowadays. Amazing.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that in this case, that's the Android style after all. But personally I heavily dislike Material UI.)
I would say that this UI is ugly though. Spacing is all over the place, the icons don't look cohesive at all apart from the colors used (for example, rounded vs sharp corners), the yellowed paper looking background color, overuse of bold/italic/colored text (especially multiple of those at the same time), inconsistent display of the same thing (in one screenshot the mailbox name is displayed as "Gmail", in the other as "[Gmail]"). And so on.
But that doesn't mean it's "outdated", this would have been equally as bad 10 years ago.
(I just have a knee jerk reaction to people saying "outdated UI" because usually it's used as a justification to replacing perfectly well designed UI with a worse version just so that it follows contemporary design trends. Cf the Windows Settings app.)
they probably said that because its kinda ugly, but also follows the frutiger metro trend from a decade ago
The app uses Material UI, sure, but it's anything but minimalist. It feels the dev(s) tried to use and cram as much as possible from what's available from the design without really thinking of usability. Information density HAS to be lower when using a phone, since the screens as much smaller than a monitor and you don't have as much precision when using fingers to navigate around.
That's half the reason I like Thunderbird. Email hasn't changed for 20 years, and neither has Thunderbird's interface. I don't need shadows and 3D effects and stylised colours and buttons, I just want a white page with black text displaying the content of my incoming messages.
You seem to be a function over form person, and I'm a function and form person. Surely, email hasn't changed since ever and all I need to see it's contents is a white page with black text, but that doesn't mean everything else has too look bad or lacking meanwhile, specially on a phone.
FairEmail design looks modern. Its just ugly and way too busy
Busy is fine. It is just really poorly laid out in a ton of ways.
Despite that, still my manl mail client on phone.
If "modern" means Android 5, sure.
it's fully customizable. After some tweaking you can get it to be more minimal and clean than K9 or any other client
Better how? There's no right or wrong answer, I had both.
The menus are definitely busy and confusing (there are many options), but once it's set up I've never been bothered by the UI. I quite like how emails are shown OOTB in fact, with the right padding and day separation; I also use most buttons that are offered by default. So yeah, sane defaults.
Off the top of my head what I like:
Not trying to say it's better, to each their own. But it's great.
edit: I received an email at 06:19 in fairemail. it's now 06:56 and I just received it in thunderbird
rather https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail or https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.email/
Not bad for a mail client for the early 2000s.