The Vivaldi team announced that they are bringing an Email client, a Feed Reader, and a Calendar – all of these together in the latest Vivaldi technical preview release.
The first technical preview of Vivaldi with these three features is immediately available for download and you can enable it with just a tweak (I explained how – at the end of this post).
This is probably the best thing that happened to a browser with all three important information sources packed together in a browser for seamless integration. I mean, imagine – if you set up all your emails, feeds, calendar and sync with your Vivaldi account. You can access them anywhere, on any device, and even in Chromebooks.
But I am skeptical about how the email is stored after retrieving it from the server though. Because email box sizes tend to be in terms of gigabytes for the majority of users.
Table of Contents
Vivaldi – Email Client, Feed Reader, and Calendar
Vivaldi team calls it together “Vivaldi Mail” consisting of three components – the Email client, Feed reader, and the Calendar.
Email Client
The Vivaldi Mail can access your existing emails from service provides with IMAP/POP3 supports and Calendar Services (CalDev). That means you can set up Vivaldi Browser to access emails from third-party providers such as FastMail, Gmail, etc. (I am yet to try the Gmail two-step authentication in Vivaldi – that might be on another article).
If you configure Vivaldi Mail to the maximum extent – well your all emails are indexed by Vivaldi and you can do offline work easily.
The Vivaldi email comes with almost all the options that the best email client provides. Such as – custom folders, mailing lists, filters, searches, flags, labels, counters for unseen and unread emails (wow!), and many more.
And this is just the technical preview. Many more features are in pipeline and hopefully, they will be implemented before the final release.
Feed Reader
The Vivaldi Feed reader is a component of the Vivaldi email. That means a Feeds section is present inside the email panel. The feeds can be read, unread like email. All the feeds are indexed so you can search in the Feeds as well.
This feature probably a blow to the paid feeds reader services out there who provide paid options for search and indexing for feeds.
You can easily import your existing feed OPLM files in the Vivaldi feed reader.
Calendar
The Vivaldi calendar is a simple yet powerful calendar integrated into the browser. You have the option to store calendars locally or sync them online.
Vivaldi calendar is capable of sync with any CalDAV calendar and synchronizing with Google Calendar and Outlook is also possible.
All the usual features are available. Such as day, week, month view, invitations, date-time, participants, inline editing of meetings, and many more.
Download and Enable
Remember, these features are released as a technical preview. That means you may encounter bugs. I would recommend not to set up your professional emails or calendars right now and wait for the stable feature release.
If you want to enable the features, download Vivaldi from the below link for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Then go to vivaldi://experienmts from the address bar. And enable Vivaldi email. Then restart the browser.
So, all these features in a browser probably too good to be true. And Vivaldi probably gains some more users with this in a never-ending browser war market where Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and others are competing.
But, in my opinion, I am not sure about the privacy concerns as the browser code can read your emails. Although the source is available, it is a Chromium-based proprietary freeware browser.
But I believe, for general users, you can go ahead and check out the features if you like.
Picture credits: Vivaldi
