In its efforts to stand out from the rest of the pack, the Vivaldi browser now includes a full-fledged email client built directly into the web browser. The email client is complemented with a calendar and a feed reader, making the web browser more useful than ever. “The use of email is only increasing, and the way we use it is evolving,” wrote Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi, in a blog post announcing the release. “We’ve designed Vivaldi Mail around speed, elegance, and, of course, customization, which is our main strength and the pure awesomeness that we strive for.”
All in One
Thanks to the new feature, you can now exchange emails, subscribe to feeds, and manage your daily to-do lists, all without leaving the comforts of the web browser. Vivaldi insists its efforts to supercharge the web browser don’t weigh down the app and shouldn’t have a noticeable difference on its performance. Vivaldi Email supports all the features you’d expect from a regular standalone email client. It supports both IMAP and POP3 services and can also automatically detect settings for popular services like Gmail, reducing the complexity of adding your email account to the app. You can add multiple accounts, and Vivaldi claims it’ll do a much better job of automatically sorting your messages into smart folders for easier viewing than your existing client. “The core of Vivaldi Mail is the database,” Tetzchner told Lifewire over email. “You access all your emails, from all your email providers, right there in the browser. You can avoid spending time organizing your emails, as Vivaldi does it for you.” On top of this, it includes a “powerful search feature” that even works when you’re offline since the client indexes all emails, even those you haven’t read yet. Vivaldi claims that, unlike other email clients, Vivaldi Mail does much of the heavy lifting, automatically detecting mailing lists and mail threads, saving you the effort to categorize conversations into folders manually. It refers to these automatically created folders as views, and each one gets its own search bar along with a handful of useful toggles to further filter the messages in the view. Vivaldi Email backs it all up with a slew of customization options, though with reasonable defaults, to appeal to both advanced and non-technical people.
One With Everything
Brendan Cooney, Head of IT Support at EF Education First, likes Vivaldi Email’s promise of offering the convenience of webmail with the functionality of a full-fledged offline email client. “I much prefer having email and calendar in the browser,” Cooney told Lifewire over email. “I don’t like switching between so many apps during the day. It’s a bit like context switching, sometimes I’ll change to my calendar, and just by having to change apps/windows, I feel like I’ve forgotten what I was trying to do.” Having spent some time tinkering with it, Cooney believes rolling all the functionalities into the web browser is much more convenient and helpful than juggling between different apps and windows. “By having all my mail and all my calendars in my browser, I can use a keystroke to get to them easily. Huge time-saver,” asserts Cooney. Vivaldi Email is currently available on the three most popular desktop operating systems, Windows, macOS, and Linux. “I really like the conceptual ideas behind this product, but I do think offering a desktop-only solution in 2022 is… sub-optimal,” Shane Coughlan, General Manager, OpenChain Project, wrote on Twitter. When Lifewire asked why Vivaldi decided to skip releasing the Mail functionality on mobile platforms like Android, Tetzchner said they focused on the desktop because of a lack of email clients for the platform and also because the integration of a mail client into the browser is much more apparent on the desktop. “On mobile, there are more options,” said Tetzchner. “But as we are already getting a lot of requests for mobile, we will evaluate [a version for mobile] moving forward,” he confirmed.
