FairEmail

FairEmail is an email app by Marcel Bokhorst, with more than a million downloads on Google Play. It works with providers that offer IMAP or POP3 and SMTP, and its README lists, among other things, “Unlimited accounts”, “Unified inbox”, “Conversation threading”, “Two way synchronization”, “Push notifications” and “Offline storage and operations”. It “will work properly on devices without any Google service installed”, and it has no Firebase push service: it keeps its own connection to your mail servers instead, which is why it shows a permanent notification (see the questions below).

Privacy features

• Images and links: the app asks before it shows images in a message, “to prevent tracking”, and before it opens links, to catch tracking and phishing; it also reformats messages to make phishing easier to spot.
• Encryption: OpenPGP, through a separate app such as OpenKeychain, and S/MIME.
• Optional extras that use outside services, all off by default: website icons, Gravatar and Libravatar pictures, brand logos (BIMI), DuckDuckGo icons, spam blocklists, translation with DeepL, grammar checks with LanguageTool, attachment checks with VirusTotal, and writing help from OpenAI or Gemini. Several of them, such as DeepL, VirusTotal, OpenAI and Gemini, need your own API key.

The privacy policy says: “Except for error reports (disabled by default), the app does not send any data to the developer.” In fact this version can’t send error reports at all: the Bugsnag reporting was removed in version 1.2273 (April 2025), although the policy, last updated in September 2026, still describes it.

What goes online

Besides your mail servers:

• Update checks: when you return to the app’s main screen, this GitHub build asks GitHub for the latest release if its last check was at least 4 hours ago (a week if the Play Store app is installed), and tells you when there’s a new one; it doesn’t install anything. The README: “this can be turned off in the miscellaneous settings.”
• Setting up an account: to find your server settings, the quick-setup wizard can look at standard addresses on your email domain, which receive your email address and are retried over plain HTTP if the secure versions fail, and in Thunderbird’s public database of providers.
• Some features go online only when you use them, such as looking up a link’s server (ipinfo.io) or checking a password against Have I Been Pwned, which receives only the first five characters of its hash.

IzzyOnDroid marks this build with two anti-features, citing Google’s billing library. That library was removed from the GitHub version in 2024. The Google component we found in this version is part of Google Play services, used only by the option Use updated SSL provider, which is off by default outside the Play version. Our scan found no trackers.

Pro features

Most of the app is free. Pro features include colours and avatars, notification actions, snoozing and sending later, rules, reply templates, signing and encrypting with S/MIME, and a message list widget. In this version you unlock them on the developer’s website: a donation of at least € 0.10 activates them once, and € 7 or more lets you activate them on all the Android devices you own. The FAQ notes “that all current and future pro features can be purchased with a one-time payment, and that there is no subscription.”

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 1.2339, from 24 October 2026, through IzzyOnDroid: the same file, byte for byte, as the GitHub release, signed with the developer’s key. It can update a FairEmail installed from Google Play or GitHub. The FAQ adds that since the start of 2024 the Play Store app can update apps not installed from it, so Play may replace this copy with its own version.
• The README: “Only the versions in the Play Store and GitHub are official releases.” The FAQ adds: “There is support only if the app was downloaded via one of the supported download locations”, which the README lists; if you need the developer’s help, install the same version from GitHub.
• Compared with the Play version, the GitHub version also has Gravatar, Libravatar and BIMI pictures, saves calendar invitations automatically and works with Android Auto, according to the FAQ. F-Droid’s build has no OAuth sign-in.
• Version 1.2339 registers RFC 2392 mid: links so they can open a locally stored message by its Message-ID. It also updates MiniDNS, the Public Suffix List, S/MIME roots and translations, and otherwise lists small fixes and all reported issues fixed.
• The FAQ lists a known problem on some phones from Xiaomi, Realme, OnePlus, Oppo, Samsung, Sony, Motorola “and possibly other devices running Android 12 or 13”: “the database occasionally gets corrupted, especially after installing an update”. The data loss is on the device only, so mail on the server is safe, unless you use POP3 with Leave messages on server turned off.
• The 29.5 MB file runs on Android 6.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. 17 of its 40 permissions let different launchers show an unread count on the icon; contacts and calendar access are optional.
• The screenshots are the project’s own, from 2021.
• FairEmail is licensed under the GPL-3.0 or later. The source of this version is at https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/tree/1.2339.

Flagged by IzzyOnDroid:

• NonFreeComp: Contains non-free components or libraries.
• NonFreeNet: Relies on or promotes a proprietary network service.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).