[jrockway]

IMAP email is very weak. Really weak. Even the third party clients are weak.

How so? I am an IMAP power-user and K9 meets all of my needs. Flagging works, push works, folders work, SSL + auth works in both directions, and it supports my self-signed certificate. K9 is infinitely better than my work Blackberry, which is supposedly the "premier push email experience".

I am really not sure what more an email client could do for you.

[gleb]

K9 is good. Not up to the standards of 6 year old ChatterEmail on Palm just yet, but vastly better than the builtin client of iPhone's Mail.

And it's an active Open Source project improving on original Android's source, a direct benefit of Android's openness:

* http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

* http://www.slideshare.net/obrajesse/k9

* http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/source/list

* http://groups.google.com/group/k-9-mail/topics

Incidentally Mark Blanc, author of ChatterEmail on Palm now works for Google on Android Email (among other things?).

As best as one can tell he gave up on the idea of creating a killer email client for Android on his own or was acquired:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Blank

* http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Emai...

* http://forum.androidcentral.com/android-applications/22105-m...

[jsz0]

K-9's UI is kind of terrible though it is fully functional.

[gleb]

Ugly it definitely is.

[jrockway]

The notification bar says how many new messages you have. You follow the notification and get a list of messages. You read them, then they go away. You can press the star to flag. You can click reply to reply.

It's weird that you have to press menu and choose an option to send a message after you've composed it, but it's not really that bad of a UI choice.

[theBobMcCormick]

Yup, I can never figure out why so many people recommend K-9 mail. I'm guessing from this discussion that it has more features for IMAP users, but for ActiveSync it has less, and the UI is as step backward, even more ugly and awkward than the built in Android Mail client, which IMHO is like the ugly duckling of the default Android apps.

[jrockway]

I'm guessing that any ActiveSync features exist only by accident, from the original fork of the official Mail client. K-9 is an IMAP client, nothing else.

[theBobMcCormick]

Are you sure? Because neither the description in the Market, nor the project description on the K9 Google Code project webpage say it's only an IMAP client. Here's the description from the K9mail Google Code Project webpage:

"K9 is an opensource email client based on the Email application shipped with the initial release of Android.

K9 is focused on making it easy to chew through large volumes of email. It's our hope that K9 leads to improvements in the core Android mail client. "

If they're intending it to be only an IMAP client, nothing more, they aren't doing a very good job communicating that.