Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Vivaldi Mail?

03 Dec 2020

I’m a huge fan of the Vivaldi web browser, so when I saw an article pop up in my news feed about a Vivaldi mail client, I just had to check this out.

I remember a long long time ago, back in the Netscape days, mail clients were pretty common place. Eudora. Thunderbird. Outlook Express. Some were either tightly tied to a browser or a part of one. So, when I hear that Vivaldi is creating one, I know there’s precedent for this kind of move. I wasn’t aware of how much precedent there was though.

It turns out this is a continuation of an earlier effort. The founder of Vivaldi is Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, formerly of Opera. Opera had a mail client that developed itself a pretty decent following called Opera Mail, or M2. Vivaldi’s mail client is being referred to as M3.

So, with all this history behind it and me being a fan of Vivaldi, this seems like a no brainer to try. Well, I held off becaues I think email is broken in general, but I finaly caved and fired it up.

After the latest snapshot is installed on your system, it’s pretty easy to turn on. Just go to the Experiments page, and check the box. This adds the Mail, Contacts, and Calendar panels, and enables the clients.

I haven’t really spent a lot of time in them to be honest. I really was mostly interested in the “Feeds” portion of the email client, which is an RSS reader. Unfortunately Jon himself threw cold water on my hopes for it. So far, they haven’t implemented syncing of read/unread news feed items, and it’s not on the road map as of yet.

This particular feature is a deal breaker for me. I have a lot of RSS feeds that I watch on a daily basis, and I have no desire to go sifting through all that stuff more than once. I can’t have something I’ve read on my phone be not read on my computer.

Vivaldi already offers sync service, but as of yet the Feeds doesn’t use it. I sincerely hope that this is something they consider as this would be a real game changer for me.

For the time being, I’ll try out the email client and see if it’s a better deal than the smattering of wev interfaces I currently use. I might setup the calendar and stuff too.

I realize it’s still in it’s infancy, and these features haven’t even hit the standard release. Hopefully by the time it does the functionality I’m wishing for will be included.

Day 98 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.



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