Why a browser and mail combination is worth it
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
Personally, and I realize I'm probably an outlier here, but I want to keep my email as far away from my web browser and the internet as possible, unless I'm being very deliberate. If I open an email, I want all remotely hosted content blocked, I don't want JS to run, I'd prefer even the most basic HTML stripped out entirely and the message presented as plain text. The more interconnected my mail client and browser are, the more I'd fear an errant click could result in a loss of security and/or privacy. Email is toxic, and I really want it quarantined.
To my great annoyance, the text version of many emails is broken, I see unfilled template variables all over the place.
While viewing emails on the web interface I use the email provider setting to block images from loading. That along with an ad blocker and JS blocker does a good job.
You are right that the text versions of many emails are terribly broken. I don't think the text versions are paid attention to anymore. I have been on the other side sending out mailers to our customers and while working with mailer systems I realized that the de facto way of working these days is to compose an HTML email and let the mailer system strip out all the HTML tags to create the text version. Of course that leads to terrible text versions of the emails.
I actually use email-to-RSS with a dedicated reader to further compartmentalize myself, and I’ve found so many needlessly mutilated plain text newsletters. I don’t understand it. Maybe some notion that HTML/CSS/JS in emails increases turnover? In some cases I get it, for instance my local grocer probably benefits heavily from all the pretty pictures and hyperlinks. However my local news org sends out almost entirely HTML-formatted “plain” text, so that just seems like useless effort. And if its because the automated mail systems use it as defaults, that makes a lot of sense.
That fight was doomed from the moment it got named "email". With that name people were going to expect "email" to be like postal mail but online.
With postal mail we can use any fonts and styles and colors that we can put on paper by hand or that our word processors can put on paper. We can include graphs and tables and images. We can even send files by putting them on physical media that is small enough to fit in our envelope.
And so it was pretty much inevitable that email would get the ability to handle all that too, as soon as both of these conditions came to pass: (1) the Internet became widespread in the general population and (2) common office and home computers became sufficiently capable to reasonably handle fancy documents.
I define better in the Aristotelian sense - the emails job is to convey information into my brain and my argument is that properly formatted email is better than nonformatted email at this task.
Your email client may already do some, or all of this with plain text in which case it is essentially an (incomplete, partial, non-compatible) markdown render. But why not have a standard for how to render email that works with 99.9% of readers?
Well we do have that, and the standard is HTML. It's ugly if you look at it, but it works and that is better than being theoretical and clean, no? I mean I want to send LaTeX that adapt to the readers screen, or AsciiDoc, but that isn't going to happen.
While we could idealize about dispatching LaTeX content that can dynamically adapt to the recipient's screen size, or fantasize about the use of AsciiDoc, the reality is that such alternatives are not broadly supported and hence are currently unfeasible.
I do agree with you about blocking external images by default.
It needs explicit actions for downloading attachments and images or for viewing the HTML version in a browser.
In this case it is trivial to do, even without any MUA, any operations like exporting, importing, searching, moving, deleting, extracting and so on, either manually or with scripts.
I have seen in the past problems with certain MUAs that had an obfuscated mailbox format, where the mailbox was a black hole that captured your messages, which were very difficult to export and import into another MUA, if a change was desired or if the original MUA became corrupted.
Exporting into other formats can still be tricky though because not everyone can handle MBOX and there are variations.
I also want a web browser to be a web browser, not something that "contains" other apps. For mail I want to open my mail client, not web browser.
Having an integrated email client into a browser is really like a cheap Windows computer prebundled with crapware and malware.
Definitely less featured but I don't need the extras anyway.
> Not even all modern email clients
I think a slightly more accurate statement is that all modern email clients contain an html renderer, which is _not_ the same as a browser.
"Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS."
The real question is why the OS can't do the job of the web browser in the first place. Has anyone ever tried integrating one so that people could use web pages in the same native integrated way as programs, opening them like say, a file manager would open directories? I guess Electron, but that doesn't really count given that it's just a reskinned browser.
So browsers implement their own tabs and so browsers are basically becoming a second window manager. Once you have this it is natural to consume more "applications" to fit into your window manager. The web is a powerful enough feature to start this process.
I wrote about this a while back https://kevincox.ca/2021/01/11/tabs-were-a-mistake/
The opinion whether it's good or bad also varied.
I vaguely remember saving web bookmarks as files, and using the built-in browser to navigate them to them. The shell (WPS) had the philosophy: "everything is an object".
It was very cool for its time.
What are these mail clients that don't do threads or have search? The only mail client I've encountered in the last 10 years without threading was the mobile ProtonMail client.
Also, every point in that list is either of questionable value (if I've already selected the text, there's not huge barrier to just pasting it in an email manually) or applies to all email clients running in a browser.
The only advantage I can think of for having an integrated browser/mail client is not needing a pinned tabbed to always have email notifications when the browser is open, and funnily enough it's not even mentioned in the article.
Their mail implementation is frustrating though. Servers that need OAuth (MS, Google) seem to require re-authentication every couple of days, and I've never managed to achieve outgoing mail with them.
The way the mailbox view works like an ordinary browser tab (but the folders are in a sidebar) is pretty annoying too. Normally when I'm doing email I want to refer to something else, often a web page, but if I try to make the mail tab a separate window I just get a "Mail is in Another Window" message.
Easier to just use webmail, honestly.
Any potential advantage is offset by disadvantages --- a big one being added lockin to make switching browsers more difficult and complex.
For simple needs, mail is already available in most any browser --- it's called "webmail".
Likewise I used Thunderbird privately, and still use as my POP3 based mail archive, I find the UI not as bad as outlook, but still not really practical my everyday needs.
So I ended up with using Vivaldi in spite of not being a believer of integrating mail an browsing in one program.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-w...
So I switched back to Thunderbird after a decade or so with the nice Owl-plugin to access my office Exchange. So if you need to connect to MS Exchange but don't want Outlook, try the plugin. It's only 10 bucks a year.
Not having to worry about syncing, search being excellent, Gmail doing the right thing with linebreaks and word-wrapping and threading, Google Calendar integration, snoozing, the "add attached photo to Google Photos" button. It all works fine and is hard to give up.
And I bet Gmail.com running in a modern browser is more complicated than a mail client from that time.
As such, browsers are now an app platform. They don't need to ship with prebaked apps like mail. They need APIs like a powerful runtime, visualization layer, background services and notifications... and they have them.
Its scripted to send my newsletters to a reader service, so I don't have to open them manually.
I don't think there is any major thing Thunderbird has gotten over the last 10 years, but it is still more powerful than this new email.
Oh and I have my mail locally, so if I don't have internet I can still read, write and search every email going back 10+ years.
Maybe it could be argued that feeds are like news, and a news are like mail, so a newsreader is part of the mail client. I haven't checked any statistics, but news are likely even more dead than rss/atom feeds, which breaks this chain of reasons.
Same with their calendar feature. Doesn't support calendars shared with me via Google. Just not fleshed out enough.
I use Vivaldi, but this was why I've never started using the mail client yet. My other clients (NeoMutt, mu4e, and web clients) work fine, so until full feature parity is achieved I'm less likely to try Vivaldi. Though I do find the integration to be a valuable offering, especially since it's already my browser of choice.
Unfortunately, Vivaldi Mail does not respect the default browser setting, and opens links from emails in Vivaldi only. This creates a mess of duplicate website tabs, logging in again, etc.
-- an avid `mutt` user.
I miss making websites using Sea Monkey composer.