Thought the M3 roadworks took a while? Five years on, Vivaldi opens up a technical preview of its email client
- Reference: 1606316412
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/25/vivaldi_mail/
- Source link:
"It arrives," [1]wrote Vivaldi boss Jon von Tetzchner , "just ahead of Thanksgiving as a way of saying 'thanks for waiting'."
And goodness, it has been a while coming. Back in 2015, the browser makers [2]confirmed : "A robust, efficient, lightweight and good looking email client called M3 is to be integrated into Vivaldi." And the faithful [3]waited , [4]patiently .
Over the years, various company representatives have confirmed to us that the client existed, but none would commit to a release date. And now here we are.
Dubbed by some as M3 (likely in tribute to the long abandoned Opera Mail client, known as M2) the technical preview is not a separate stand-alone application, but is built into the Vivaldi browser itself. Getting it working requires the downloading of snapshot 2115.4 of the browser and the enabling of the functions via vivaldi://experiments .
Once done, it's a relatively straightforward experience. As well as the mail client, the feature includes a feed reader and a calendar. The former integrates with the existing IMAP/POP3 service, while the latter hooks up via CalDav.
The use of such a client means one does not need to fire up something like Gmail's web interface to collect one's mail.
Assuming, of course, one can get Gmail integration working. We had a crack at it and failed pretty much at the first hurdle with a blocked message from Google. Von Tetzchner [5]remarked : "Hopefully Google will enable access soon. It is kind of absurd that they do this, but we have contacted them again about this issue. Gmail is working fine for those of us that have been using M3 with it during the development period, but they put this limit in place and they need to lift it."
At present the number of accounts that can be logged into Gmail IMAP and Google CalDAV with Vivaldi's client at any one time is limited to 100. "Google," [6]Vivaldi said , "has (after 9 months) still not approved our account access Consent Screen."
Still, this is a technical preview after all. Time remains to iron out the wrinkles.
The email client did, however, seem pretty complete and stable when used with non-Google email and calendar accounts. Multiple accounts can be added, and offline searches are snappy enough. Different mailbox views are supported, as well as IMAP folders and message queuing. The Mail client also includes a feeds section for subscription fans and the Calendar supports day, week, multi-week or month views of upcoming events.
It's a neat tool, and one that will be welcomed by users of the company's browser and those that miss the old Opera Mail client. Many, however, will have made the move to something like Thunderbird by now if an offline email client is their thing, or will already be rolling with one of the web mail clients available.
As for a final release, Vivaldo said the new toys "require a fair bit more polish and hence will not be finished and ready in time for the release of Vivaldi 3.5 stable," although they can still be activated via the experiments page. Builds for Windows, macOS and Linux are available as well as ARM32 and ARM64 under Linux (although the latter pair have an "unsupported" health warning). ®
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[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-technical-preview/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160124104116/http://www.technologytell.com/apple/150554/hands-new-vivaldi-browser-creators-opera/
[3] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/4033/vivaldi-m3-mail-client-when
[4] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/31359/any-word-on-m3-internal-mail-client/19
[5] https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-technical-preview/#post-418341
[6] https://vivaldi.com/blog/address-bar-and-tab-fixes-better-drm-support-plus-the-start-of-the-mail-calendar-and-rss-technical-previews-vivaldi-browser-snapshot-2115-4/
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Fantastic
The new M3 (Vivaldi mail) needs quite a lot more work, but it's already extremely capable and powerful.
List all the messages to and from a contact, without needing to search!!
Looking forward to ditching Thunderbird as soon as I can :)
Re: Fantastic
Arghh! The Register needs to fix it's commenting system. I got an error saying that my message Body was required. So I posted again...
5 years!
And we're nearly back to being able to import my Opera pre-v12 mailboxes!
Or are we? Seems to be very shaky still given their comments and the GMail problems.
It's alright, lads, I've only got 15 years of email in there and been unable to use anything but old-Opera for the last 5 years, no rush or anything!
This was the selling point of Vivaldi, which until now has been nothing a Chrome clone with tiny UI tweaks. It literally does almost NOTHING that the old Opera did.
Honestly, lads, I clung on purely out of sheer respect for the CONCEPT of an Opera-like browser after Opera became YetAnotherBrowser and ripped out all the unique characteristics. Vivaldi promised them back, so I jumped on board. And it's FIVE YEARS until a significant one reappears. Unless you count that stupid "light up your wall the same colour as your webpage" junk, the fact you've changed program icons no less than four times (and announced it like it was some huge Changelog-worthy item), or actually being able to drag bookmarks around on the bookmark bar (which took THREE YEARS to arrive).
If you've messed up the email client, it's quite literally game over and I'll just go Chrome and suck my 20-years of mail archives into GMail, which I really don't want to have to do.
I felt your pain
My name is Bob, and I too hoard my digital past... but I recently read some of my old mail, the personal crap is just that. My professional messages from 15 years ago are irrelevant. Is ISA server even a thing still? We haven't had Exchange in 15 years, and will never go back.
Sure it's nice to have, but do we want to be reminded of the bad break up with a SO, or the time Exchange crashed and the boss was pissed off. Now I think it's time to start deleting and emptying the trash!
Re: I felt your pain
My email is a veritable treasure trove of solutions, software licenses, downloads, URLs, contracts, documents, evidence, links, history, etc.
There's a reason I keep it, and it's not that there are millions of messages in there. It's that I can find THAT ONE RIGHT NOW without having to worry about how to do that.
Sure, I rarely refer to my 1997 Hotmail imports, but the point is that when I need to, it's right there. Everything from old school friends to orders to documents I wrote which are still relevant to catching people out when they say "That's not what we said". Personal, work, my old businesses I used to run, everything.
And it's a great source of spam vs real email tagged properly, for classification purposes for training spam filters.
Literally haven't deleted an email in 20 years. And literally use - and keep - Opera just for its insta-search across those 20 years of IMAP, POP, etc. accounts.
M3
I wonder how it runs on the M1 chip? I can't wait until Apple releases the M5 and Gene Roddenberry's estate pounces! Right, back to the mail client... I'll kick the tires and give it a test drive.
Being a Vivaldi user who thinks it is the best browser, I would love to use their mail client. Trouble is, we use Exchange on Office 365 at work, and it is locked down, so I have to use Outlook, whether I use the application/app or website.
When I enquired about using the iOS calendar to hook up to exchange (which is something that was locked out when we upgraded to Exchange 365, I was told they would not be making the changes required as they felt security would be reduced.
Jolly good show!
" Assuming, of course, one can get Gmail integration working. We had a crack at it and failed pretty much at the first hurdle with a blocked message from Google. "
The more opportunities to cut Gmail off from the world at large the better. Would you use a postal service you couldn't trust not to open all your letters and parcels in transit?
Nobody has yet taken seriously the indisputable fact that if you use any of these "free" email services for business you're probably breaking European data protection law. Not only are you sending the personal data of your correspondents to a non-compliant ('third') country (USA), you're also forcing them to do the same if they want to reply to your emails. If the data are merely in transit through a third country the law doesn't apply, but as Gmail emails (and those of similar 'web mail' services) come to rest on retention servers in a third country, the law does apply.
Fantastic
I've been stuck with the not-very-good Thunderbird for some time now. At last we can have databased emails, with all sorts of different views made possible.
A simple one that I find extremely useful is being able to show all mail to/from a particular contact. Can't seem to do that in Thunderbird.
Oh, and the Vivaldi Mail (M3) searches are indexed and nearly instant!