Comment by memling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memling | Hacker News Reader

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> What I DONT care about is the Email client they are working on. I'd rather see them focus on the browser features.

Like you, I've used Vivaldi for years. I downloaded because of the email client. Opera's M2 was a great mail client. I'm probably in the minority of users who don't use the usual suspects for webmail, and having an integrated mail client is nice. M2, in particular did some nice things:

* Fast full-text search through mail

* No organization: automatic mailing list aggregation; easy contact management; easy email filter by contact or thread

* Keyboard navigable.

* Doesn't default to top-quoting.

* RSS integration.

The M3 client had to be rewritten, one presumes, as a Chrome extension. This had to be pretty awful, considering, and probably explains part of the reason that everything took so long. I've been driving M3 for awhile, and what I really miss is suitable keyboard shortcuts. For the most part I've been very happy with it, though.

I despise webmail as well, Thunderbird all the way, but it has become a bit of an annoyance lately for some use-cases, so I am willing to look at alternatives.

However, some Thunderbird extensions have even become essential to me, most importantly Cardbook, which I use to manage Contacts across devices (shared via carddav on a selfhosted Nextcloud). Does M3 support carddav properly?

Also, can I add multiple mail accounts easily?

Are mails part of Vivaldi sync?

I might actually try it just to get a look at the current state. RSS client is nice, too.

> Does M3 support carddav properly?

No. This would actually be a pretty killer feature, and if they've implemented sync properly(?) maybe that's something they'll add in the future.

> Also, can I add multiple mail accounts easily?

Yes. I've had no issues here, although I've been using IMAP rather than POP3 for the interim while I decide how well it's going to work for me. (On the other hand, I haven't been back on M2 for several months, so maybe it's time for the switch?)

> Are mails part of Vivaldi sync?

No. Contacts make sense to me, but mail across sync would be basically implementing IMAP for sync purposes, right?

There are things still missing:

* mail import for those of us who still prefer POP to IMAP and have a ton of emails on our system

* highlight-to-quote

* more configurable keyboard shortcuts

* default bottom-quoting

* tighter calendar integration

But on the balance, it's a pretty decent client. I'll look forward to improvements as they have time to commit, but working it into Chromium has been a much more significant challenge than they originally anticipated. The devs/testers talked often about it not being ready for prime time, but I think that had much more to do with the extension development than it did with protocols (for example). I would also suspect that they're significantly understaffed compared to other teams.

And, to be honest, I doubt there's really even a big market for mail clients these days at all: we're mostly on Gmail or Outlook or some other web-based IMAP with integration across all devices. In-browser mail clients without some kind of super-sync feature ... just aren't likely to gain any traction.

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