A fully-featured email client is the latest feature to be added to Vivaldi, the Chromium-based web browser.
The bods beavering away on the wannabe web fave have added a native IMAP and POP3 email client to the app, as well as a RSS feed reader, and multi-account friendly calendar. Other recent feature additions have included a word processor and a built-in arcade game.
Although Vivaldi Mail (as the feature is known) is currently of a ‘pre-Beta quality’ it is fully functional and works relatively well already.
On paper Vivaldi Mail will work with most modern e-mail services via IMAP or POP. Alas, for now, this doesn’t include Google or Gmail accounts.
When I attempt to authorise Vivaldi Mail through the Google consent flow (so it can access my Gmail inbox) an alert appears to say: “Sign in with Google temporarily disabled for this app. This app has not been verified yet by Google in order to use Google Sign In.”
Vivaldi says the is a ‘known issue’ and, for now, no more than 100 concurrent logins to Gmail from Vivaldi Mail are permitted.
You can use alternative mail providers with the app. Vivaldi Mail can even autodetect the correct settings (which can be manually edited too). The browser offers to help you sign up for a free Vivaldi.net emai account (assuming you want one).
I won’t make any claims about Vivaldi Mail being better or worse than any other mail clients, like venerable Thunderbird or (my fave) Geary. That said, it’s nice to have options.
A wealth of mail settings are available to this app. You can change the mail view layout from vertical panes (default) to horizontal (more like Thunderbird); set preferences for how often to check for new mail, and where to show new mail alerts within the browser UI.
Vivaldi mail isn’t enabled by default. So, to test Vivaldi Mail you will need to explicitly enable Vivaldi Mail by hand. This is hard. Just open vivaldi://experiments in a new tab, check the box beside the “Mail, Calendar and Feeds” option, then quit and re-open Vivaldi.
h/t Çağlar