Airmail

[Daniel W]

 
So... Airmail, on the Astro, claiming to be 2.0b[eta?] - though no such version is found on Google Play - is uninstallium forceware, based on K-9 mail. Upon start, it claims support for Gmail, Vivaldi and Outlook, but promptly crashes with no error message, if told to use an Outlook on the web, aka. Office 365 aka. Microsoft 365 account...

Manual account setup exists, and lacks support for Oauth2, which Microsoft seems to have been phasing in since 2020 and finally made no-more-excuses mandatory on 1/1 2023, and K-9 claims to have added support for in release 6.2, about six months ago (see https://github.com/thundernest/k-9). I suppose that even the "latest" Airmail [beta?] is based on something much older.

Ideally, if Planet insists on it being there, it should be nominally up to date, aka. usable. Then again, maybe this isn't a problem Planet should try to solve? There is web mail, there's an outlook app from Microsoft and the original K-9 says it supports Office 365 now. Perhaps they should just partake in that project to make sure it's smooth on the Astro.

Either way, that's not where we are today, so I'd like to pick the brains of the forum. Has anyone here tried the Outlook app, or K-9 6.202+ on an Astro. If so, is there anything I might want to know? Yeah, I could try them myself, but if anyone already has, I'd like to hear your opinion.

Pure webmail in Vivalidi appears to work, but seems to fall back to composing in plain text. While perhaps the purest form of email, it seems I need some colour and a more prominent font, to make my colleagues notice questions they are supposed to answer. They're nice people, just stressed.

Edit: Sometimes OESF seems to eat the supposed blank lines between paragraphs...

[Daniel W]

Welp... starting to answer myself...

While the "proper" K-9 can, apparently, technically send html mail, it doesn't appear to support any form of actually composing "rich text" email, and, at times, I need a bit of, say, larger orange bold text to make my colleagues notice questions they're actually supposed to answer an such. They're nice and clever people, though often a bit stressed.

I'd settle for some simple tags, like
[size=medium][color=#FF9900][b]Question:[/b][/color][/size] here on OESF, but it seems it doesn't even has that.

Just reading about the Microsoft Outlook app made me itch the wrong kind of way. I can't put my finger on it, but both the regular and the lite version seems strung together form a handful of popular features, rather than being a comprehensive tool for a well defined purpose. It might be nice to have a calendar integrated in the mail app, but I already have two calendar apps forced upon me and if the spam filter isn't working, I can't really use any of the features, so well... unconvinced and slightly deterred for now. Also, it doesn't seem to offer any "rich" composing either, in which case it is a bit pointless for me.

Hm... Last time I tried to fix up my mobile e-mail (ending up with using Remote Desktop to a Windows computer with a proper e-mail solution on it) I recall FairEmail whizzing past on the information superhighway... ehm... internet. I might give that a look again...

Even if it does work for me, it would still mean having to install an extra email client, which, well, feels a bit clunky.

[cam1965]

Welp... starting to answer myself...

While the "proper" K-9 can, apparently, technically send html mail, it doesn't appear to support any form of actually composing "rich text" email, and, at times, I need a bit of, say, larger orange bold text to make my colleagues notice questions they're actually supposed to answer an such. They're nice and clever people, though often a bit stressed.

I'd settle for some simple tags, like
[size=medium][color=#FF9900][b]Question:[/b][/color][/size] here on OESF, but it seems it doesn't even has that.

Just reading about the Microsoft Outlook app made me itch the wrong kind of way. I can't put my finger on it, but both the regular and the lite version seems strung together form a handful of popular features, rather than being a comprehensive tool for a well defined purpose. It might be nice to have a calendar integrated in the mail app, but I already have two calendar apps forced upon me and if the spam filter isn't working, I can't really use any of the features, so well... unconvinced and slightly deterred for now. Also, it doesn't seem to offer any "rich" composing either, in which case it is a bit pointless for me.

Hm... Last time I tried to fix up my mobile e-mail (ending up with using Remote Desktop to a Windows computer with a proper e-mail solution on it) I recall FairEmail whizzing past on the information superhighway... ehm... internet. I might give that a look again...

Even if it does work for me, it would still mean having to install an extra email client, which, well, feels a bit clunky.

Try K-@ Mail. Improved version of k-9 and airmail. Rich text also.

[Daniel W]

Thank you. The version I find on Google Play seems to be from 2016, which, in itself, doesn't have to matter. I have other apps of that age.

As Outlook.com / Outlook on the web (or whatever they call it this week) uses OAuth2 for its 2FA (on my job, anyway), support for which was only recently added to the "canonical" K-9, I might, however, run into the same authentication issues as Airmail presented me with (though, hopefully, handling it nicer than just terminating with no clue, as Airmail currently does).
K-9 "proper" seems to lack all support for composing rich text. I am having a look at FairEmail at the moment. Its Wizard failed to set up my Outlook account, complaining something about the admin maybe disabling SMTP or something, which didn't seem accurate, so I'll have another look at it tomorrow or so.

[cam1965]

Thank you. The version I find on Google Play seems to be from 2016, which, in itself, doesn't have to matter. I have other apps of that age.

As Outlook.com / Outlook on the web (or whatever they call it this week) uses OAuth2 for its 2FA (on my job, anyway), support for which was only recently added to the "canonical" K-9, I might, however, run into the same authentication issues as Airmail presented me with (though, hopefully, handling it nicer than just terminating with no clue, as Airmail currently does).
K-9 "proper" seems to lack all support for composing rich text. I am having a look at FairEmail at the moment. Its Wizard failed to set up my Outlook account, complaining something about the admin maybe disabling SMTP or something, which didn't seem accurate, so I'll have another look at it tomorrow or so.

In K-9     and k-@ I had to generate a password to authenticate them. My email is from yahoo. It only worked to generate a password when I disabled my wifi and used the 5G directly from astro ( I used the brave browser ). I followed the instructions below:
Sign in to your Yahoo Account Security page.
Click Generate app password or Generate and manage app passwords.
Enter your app's name in the text field.
Click Generate password.
Follow the next instructions ( below the app password ).
Click Done.
When using my wifi the password the password was not generated .See error below:
( Yahoo Generate App Password -> Sorry, this feature is not available right now!).

It only worked when using directly 5G from astro as I said.
k-@ for me is the best email app.
Please take a look at the attachment

[Daniel W]

Thank you for your assistance. I am assigned my e-mail login and the use of 2FA from my workplace. While I do have some administrative privileges (small firm, where everybody does a bit of everything) I'm not sure I am at the liberty of creating a new password, nor I am not sure Outlook.com supports app passwords such as you describe them.
The only authentication method I know I can use is OAuth2 within an SSL/TLS connection. I think I know why I couldn't set up Fair Email. Will do new attempts, time permitting.

[cam1965]

Thank you for your assistance. I am assigned my e-mail login and the use of 2FA from my workplace. While I do have some administrative privileges (small firm, where everybody does a bit of everything) I'm not sure I am at the liberty of creating a new password, nor I am not sure Outlook.com supports app passwords such as you describe them.
The only authentication method I know I can use is OAuth2 within an SSL/TLS connection. I think I know why I couldn't set up Fair Email. Will do new attempts, time permitting.

Hi .
You can use Nine ( Mail app ). It has support for OAuth2.  The only problem is that the rich text editor works only in portrait mode. See the attachment.

[Daniel W]

Well, I finally got around to have another go. As I already had the FairEmail client installed, I made a slightly more thorough effort to find out why the setup wizard failed me the first time.

This time, I used my personal e-mail account, rather than my job e-mail (presuming, incorrectly, that they would work the same, since they are hosted by the same provider). At first, I just got another weird error from the wizard. It turned out that the weird text about "authenticated but not connected" didn't come from the email client, but rather from the server, and it turned out to be a permissions issue, where IMAP was (and remains - as I didn't have permission to change it, either) disabled on the server, probably because my cheap-ish mailbox doesn't have much storage anyway. At that point I tried the "not recommended" option of using POP3 instead. It worked and it's enough for my mobile needs, so I'm fine with it.

Here's what the GUI looks like, with a few settings tweaked a tad. The redacted stuff is just my account name

Here I'm trying out the rich text features. It's basic compared to a desktop client, but the important stuff is there

This is how the message looked when it arrived

Apparently the "highlight" didn't work. Oh, well, manually colouring the background works. That's enough for me. I'll try this one out for a while, maybe try again to add my work account and if it all pans out well, I might have found what I was looking for. If so, I'll probably get the pro version, mostly to support the developer. I'll probably make a follow-up post here in a few weeks or so.

In other related news, it seems K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android. If that transition also means the mobile app will gain some features of the desktop app (such as composing basic rich text messages) I might have a look at that. In an ideal world, Planet would too, as continuing to base their own mail app on what would then be a deprecated version of K-9 would seem silly, to me anyway. We'll see, I suppose.

[Daniel W]

There, I fixed it.

Last time, I had set up POP3 for my personal account (which has too little space for IMAP anyway). Later, I tried to set up IMAP for my work account (which, for my needs, has plenty of space). That didn't work, because "authenticated SMTP" was disabled. How Microsofts own web mail client could send, presumably authenticated, mail anyway, is beyond me. Perhaps it has some special protocol, or maybe Microsoft treats its own client differently... In any case, it turned out that I, on my work account, had enough administrative privileges to enable authenticated SMTP, so now both accounts are working. Yay.

Then Google wouldn't take my money... which turned out to be my own fault. Last year, the contactless payment antenna broke in my card, despite me being careful with it. The replacement - of course - had a new expiry date. Apparently, I hadn't shared that with Google. Rather than giving me a meaningful error message, Google just said OR-PMSA-03 instead. I suppose one complicating factor was that the old card would still have been valid, if it hadn't been replaced.

FairEmail worked very well for me even in its free form. Some advanced features were unavailable and there were a discreet nag text in the UI, but it was still a very functional e-mail client, and that nag text could even be hidden for a while. Once I had verified it met my needs, I wanted to pay for it. Not sure I need reply templates or colour codes for my two accounts, but a less than $10 tool that, for my needs, is arguably better than the free options, is a bargain in my book.

So far, it has just worked for me, with almost the default settings. I turned on a "compact view" to make better use of my landscape screen, and I turned off "conversation threading", since I, and everyone I know, are too lazy to set up address books. To send messages to someone we've been in touch with before, we'll just reply to any random message from that person, making the "conversation" grouping a mess, but I do see the point of the feature among more disciplined correspondents (or people with some centrally managed address book).

I guess I'm done with this thread now. I have finally found a cheap email client that works like a charm for my needs. Would K-9, once it becomes Thunderbird for Android, gain the ability to compose rich text messages, that might become an option for me then, but unless something breaks, I feel no need to replace FailEmail.

[gymbo]

I guess I'm done with this thread now. I have finally found a cheap email client that works like a charm for my needs. Would K-9, once it becomes Thunderbird for Android, gain the ability to compose rich text messages, that might become an option for me then, but unless something breaks, I feel no need to replace FailEmail.

"FailEmail", isn't that kind of a bad start?!?

And kind of counterproductive...