My Galaxy Tab was run­ning Android 3.1 since I bought it. The included EMail client (not the GMail APP) was fine for me. Not as com­fort­able as a real desk­top EMail client (I use Sylpheed-Claws), and not as good as my web­mail inter­face (Horde/IMP), but OK to han­dle 100 – 300 EMails a day. I liked the split into day/week/month in the list-view for the EMails, being able to select a whole day (and des­e­lect a sub­set) for quick actions (delete/move).

Yes­ter­day I updated the Tab to Andorid 3.2. While there is now a nice trans­parence effect avail­able in some places, and the Play-Store has a dif­fer­ent user-interface, the big dif­fer­ence for me is, that the behav­ior of the EMail client changed. When I view a mes­sage the message-list moves the message-list in a way that the selected mes­sage is in the first posi­tion of the message-list. This is annoy­ing, and I have not found a set­ting how to change this. This way I can not view the last dis­played mes­sage, select it (or not), view the sec­ond last, select it … and so on … and then delete all mes­sage at once.

I also noticed that the folder-list is mov­ing. I have not noticed a spe­cific pat­tern, but when I return to the folder-list I found the incom­ing folder being the first one dis­played, even if I was in a folder sev­eral pages down. This is annoy­ing too.

Well… this gave the oppor­tu­nity to have a look at other EMail clients. The first one was K-9 Mail. The first bad impres­sion was, that the boxes to select EMails are too small. I select a lot of EMails to either delete them directly (a sub­set of ver­sion con­trol com­mit logs), or to move them to a dif­fer­ent folder. It is a nice app, but as I need to select a lot, it is not really suit­able for my workflow.

For the next app, Mail­Droid, I did not had the pos­si­bil­ity to accept the self-signed cer­tifi­cate of my IMAP-server, so I deleted it immediately.

The next app was Mel­win Mail (trial ver­sion). It is based upon K-9 Mail. The message-selector boxes are big­ger, but the mesasge-list does not dis­play the full sub­ject. This does not allow me to see if I can delete the EMail unread or not. I also did not find a way to enlarge the message-list to see more of the sub­ject (and I want to have the font-size not too small). Well… this means it is not suit­able too.

I also wanted to look at Kaiten. It is based upon K-9 Mail too. Unfor­tu­nately I do not find a trial ver­sion. Based upon my expe­ri­ence with Mel­win Mail, I do not want to pay for some­thing, I may not want to use. On the web­site I do not see a link to screen­shots or sim­i­lar, only a change-log.

All the “best EMail app” postings/articles I was able to find (and have a look at) told that K-9 Mail, is the best free one, and a lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Mel­win Mail or Kaiten. I can not agree for my work­flow. EMail apps have to go a long way until they reach a niveau which allows to han­dle more than a hand­ful of mails per day and a not so sim­ple work­flow like “read all EMails as they flow in”.

Based upon this, I switched back to Android 3.1 on my Tab. While the included EMail client is not per­fect (e.g. I can not select all EMails at once in search-results), it is still bet­ter suited than what I have seen so far.

Unfor­tu­nately I can not really test 4.0.x on my Tab, the cam­era does not work in community-based Android 4.0.x ver­sions, and I do not want to miss the pos­si­bil­ity to do a video-call with my deaf brother.

Things I do not like with Android, and what I would expect instead.

The EMail-App

 This is about the nor­mal EMail App on a stock Android 3.1, not about GMail. The con­nec­tion is via IMAP.

• By default the most recent EMail is on top. If I switch to oldest-first order, the old­est EMail is shown when enter­ing a folder. I want to see the most recent one. If I let the most-recent order, I see directly the newest mes­sages, but when I read the old­est unread mes­sage and delete it, the more old mes­sage is dis­played, instead of the more recent one. KMail is doing this bet­ter (it is able to go “up” instead of only “down” to go to the more recent mes­sage when the most recent mail is sorted on top), but in KMail I can not select mul­ti­ple mes­sages as easy as with the nor­mal EMail App (it seems I have to long-tap on a mail and then tell to select the EMail, and just then I can just quickly tab on the very small area on the left of the sub­ject to select more EMails).
• Select­ing mes­sages could also be improved. When I select sev­eral mes­sages, and then — by acci­dent — enter a mes­sage and want to go back, the first “go back” uns­e­lects all mes­sages and the sec­ond “go back” goes back to the folder-view. I would like to go back directly to the folder-view, instead of uns­e­lect­ing all messages.
• The folder-view itself is also not nice. I have a lot of fold­ers. IMAP sub­fold­ers are sep­a­rated by a dot, e.g. FreeBSD.arch and FreeBSD.mul­ti­me­dia are the sub­fold­ers arch and mul­ti­me­dia in the folder FreeBSD. Each desk­top EMail pro­gram I used so far was intel­li­gent enough to cre­ate a folder-hierarchy out of this, with the pos­si­bil­ity to col­lapse the dis­play of all sub­fold­ers of FreeBSD (I have a lot there, not only those 2) into one entry. If I want to field some­thing in my hier­ar­chi­cal folder struc­ture, I have to scroll a long list of fold­ers, instead of just (auto-)opening (dur­ing drag&drop) the cor­rect hierarchy.
• I do not find an option to tell that the App shall have a look at more than the default inbox to look for new mes­sages. If I want to know if there is a new mes­sage in one of the other fold­ers, I must have a look into the folder(s).
• It looks like I can only pro­duce TOFU-replies, I have not found a way to do a proper interleaved-style reply.
• The error mes­sages when set­ting up an out­go­ing (and I assume incom­ing) server are too brief for my taste. As a default it is OK, but there should be an option to enable more verbose/technical error mes­sages for those which are able to under­stand them.
• It does not option­ally save send mails to a spe­cific (con­fig­urable) folder.
• It does not allow to cryp­to­cally sign mes­sages (at the moment I do not really care if it is via S/MIME or via PGP).
• I also would like to tab with two fin­gers, and the text in-between is selected (not only in the EMail-App).

Today I was look­ing into the Open­Source licenses which are dis­played for Android (2.3.4). There are sev­eral files which come with a BSD license.

Dur­ing look­ing at it, I noticed that the libm has the copy­right of sev­eral FreeBSD peo­ple. I did not had an in-deep look if this is because they took the FreeBSD libm, or if this is because parts of the FreeBSD libm where adopted by other BSD projects.

What I noticed is, that some spe­cial char­ac­ters are not dis­played cor­rectly. For exam­ple the name Dag-Erling Smør­grav looks man­gled in the dis­play of the license inside the phone (I hope it is dis­played bet­ter in my blog). His name is not the only prob­lem case, there are also other char­ac­ters which are not ren­dered as expected.

This does not really look professional.