I’ve been using K-9 mail on my phone. It’s a fork of the standard Android email client.
I like to keep my inbox empty, and move mail that I’ve finished dealing with, either into an appropriate mail box or a general archive box for everything else. I don’t think I’m that unusual in that, though clearly whoever designed the standard email client must think so. You can’t move email using it.
With k-9 you can, but it’s a bit of a pain. When viewing a mail, the menu has a More icon, from which you get a further menu with, among other things, “Move” and “Archive” (which moves to a pre-defined archive folder). With one or more things selected, the menu has a Batch Actions button, from which you get a menu with “Move”, “Archive” and many others.
But also, when things are selected, there’s an icon bar at the bottom of the screen. It has buttons for mark read, delete, flag, and unselect. I thought it would be nice to have “Move” and “Archive” buttons on that bar, so I put them there.
https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/pull/111
will make the batch bar buttons configurable: you can individually turn on and off the standard four, move and archive.
Personally I have delete, move and archive.
The only problem is that I’m crap at drawing icons. There already was one for move, but I’ve had to make one for archive, based on the move one but with an A on it.
I’m not a fancy code guy, but I am someone who would love to have a batch archive button. Is there any way for a non-coder to get this functionality into his copy of k-9?
If so, can you please explain in layman’s terms? I don’t know what a “diff” is.
My patch has now been merged into the main code, so if you get a recent version of K-9 you should get it.
You’ll need to go to (settings -> global settings -> interaction -> batch buttons) to configure the buttons you get, as the ones I added are off by default.
Thanks for the info, I couldn’t find the button configuration myself. I don’t need the Archive button and was quite annoyed when it suddendly became visible after the update and made the Delete button smaller. Now it’s gone and I am happy again.
It’s nice that K-9 Mail is so flexible.
Any chance of batch buttons for Kaiten? Not having them makes it slower to use than k-9, at least for this user!
As far as I can see, the source code for Kaiten is not available, so there’s no way I could add anything to it. You’ll have to contact its developer.
If you are using Kaiten because it works better on a tablet than K-9, then you should check out recent versions of K-9. They’re officially not stable releases, but I’m using 4.310 and it seems to be stable. As a development version it’s not on Android market, but you can download it from here:
http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/downloads/list
Mark-
I have a Motorola Defy XT running Android 2.3.7. I love K-9 mail, but the Archive feature doesn’t work and I really can’t live without it. Your post above says that a “pre-defined archive folder” is used but I can’t find it. I made a folder named Archive and also one named K-9 Mail with an Archive folder under it. Still, the choice to Archive a message does not come up anywhere. I went to settings -> global settings -> interaction -> batch buttons and turned on the Archive button, then rebooted, but no luck. Any ideas?
My company is republic wireless, so the phone uses WiFi calling before cellular. Could they have done something to disable this functionality?
It will use a folder called “Archive” unless you select a different one in the Folders menu of the account settings.
The batch buttons only show when you have messages selected (by swiping them to the right) in the message list.
The current version also has an archive button when you are reading a message, but old versions didn’t, and I’m not sure whether the version on Google Play is new enough.
Mark-
I really appreciate you answering my questions. I need to get this working!
When I go to the Folders menu in the Account settings, there is no option to select an archive folder.
In the Accounts settings, if I choose Display, the last choice is Enable Refile Buttons (show the Archive, Move, and Spam buttons) but it is grayed out.
When I am in my inbox and select one or more messages, I have four buttons. I selected them in Settings > Global settings > Interaction > Batch buttons. They are Delete, Move to Archive, Move, and Unselect. Only Delete and Unselect actually work in my inbox.
I am using version 4.200 of K-9 Mail.
-Worth
I solved my problem (wanting to be able to save messages) by switching to MailDroid. It allows moving messages to a folder in the mailbox or to a folder on the SD card, and also allows saving attachments from mail messages to the SD card. MailDroid also has the feature I liked best in K-9, which is the ability to send a bunch of messages to the trash at once by putting a check on all messages in the inbox, then unchecking the ones (the few!) that I want to keep in the inbox, then choosing delete.
I recommend MailDroid to anyone who isn’t happy with their email app, especially if you are using the standard Android Email app!