After a couple years break, the K-9 Mail project participates in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. We are taking two students, who will join us in our ongoing effort to make K-9 Mail a modern, fully-featured, and easy to use e-mail client!

Our first student is daquexian. He will rewrite our account setup flow, and first-time wizard. While all of our UI is in need of an overhaul (and we’re also working on that!), this part in particular is missing improvements that were made by other clients over the years. Applying the proper techniques, the setup process should ask no more than an e-mail address and password. We really shouldn’t be asking users for their SMTP server hostname and port in 2017!

The second project is done by rhari991, who is going to spend the time working on IMAP. While functional, our IMAP implementation is currently missing support for an extension called CONDSTORE, that greatly reduces network traffic used for message synchronization. He will further work on moving messages between different accounts, improvements to server-side search, and better handling for subfolders and namespaces.

We had a large number of applicants, but could only pick two due to our limited mentoring resources. A huge thanks to everyone who applied and made the competition strong!

We are looking forward to a great summer and successful projects!

- The K-9 Team