It seems like most of this works fine with browsers and MUAs separate. I can still copy text from webpages into emails and open links in tabs and add sites to my browser's bookmarks with very little friction.
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.
I don’t have a strong opinion about an email client in a browser but email clients already contain a web browser. This is due to practically all email being formatted in HTML. You could argue this is a giant mistake and you wouldn’t be wrong.
No to put words in their mouth, but I suspect they were saying they use a text email client. If so, fair enough, but most people don’t. Most people actually use their phone or webmail in a browser tab, but that’s neither here nor there.
It's not easy to find a good E-Mail client for Windows. I had to help a friend who is not good with computers, and in the end we settled for Fastmail, because we couldn't find a native client that worked acceptably. What's your recommendation?
Thunderbird. It is still the greatest email client. It has some issues with huge mailboxes but no other client I have tried even come close to the convenience of using Thunderbird.
We tried Thunderbird, but it was just not user-friendly enough to be suitable. The tabbed interface and strange pop-up windows were confusing in an e-mail client. But I'm sure it is a great client on Windows for more computer-literate people.
Another outlier here. Glad to see there are other like minded people on this thread.
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.
Yet another outlier, and I’ve experienced a similar problem in a different way.
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.
Email is a text medium. If someone can't be arsed to communicate properly in a medium, then they're just poor communicators. If I can't read the text of an email, it's just spam and goes directly in the trash. I already have a full inbox; the decision is easy.
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.
My email is better when quotes are colored differently, when links are clickable and when tabular data is presented as such.
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.
Using https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, you can set it up so that you can view html emails in your browser with a keystroke. I've found it's the best of both worlds, since i don't really use HTML email, but I like being able to look and see what's been sent to me.
It looks good! My one complaint would be that it doesn't save messages in MBOX format (I do see that it has an import option and a plugin for reading MBOX files however)
I prefer a lot the e-mail messages that are saved as individual plain text files, grouped in directories.
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.
The main advantage of MBOX files is that you only have one file per mail folder and all the filenames are known and constant no matter how much mail comes in. It means if you have a ton of mail you aren't dealing with massive numbers of tiny files. The files are still plain text and contain the bodies and full headers for each message so I can use grep or even perl to pull information from them easily.
Exporting into other formats can still be tricky though because not everyone can handle MBOX and there are variations.
I'm with you there. I use Mutt to read my mail as plain text, and have mu4e if I need to see an image in an email or whatever. Thunderbird is there if I desperately need an email to be a web page, for some reason.
Another outlier here too. I find that fairemail app on android is absolutely the best when it comes to things like ensuring no external links are auto loaded, and email is rendered as pure text with minimal markup.
Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
"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 existence of Chromebooks confirms it. When a whole OS is just there to run the web browser, the browser is the real 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.
I think it is because they invented tabs. This window grouping proved to be useful. KDE has tabs but I don't think there is a way to say "open a new window tabbed with this one" so simple functions such as middle-click to open a link in a new tab are very hard to implement. macOS was sort of closer here with grouping windows by application but it didn't provide good management options and you couldn't regroup manually.
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.
Personally I think this didn't catch on because it is quite janky in most use cases. If it had caught on we probably would have seen the same problems we see with tabs creating a second window manager/OS.
OS/2 Warp did something similar to what you describe, but with FTP sites: You could navigate them using the file manager, just like any other folder, create links, bookmarks, etc.
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".
All operating systems today (macos, windows, kde, gnome) actually have their own native WebViews. However, there are very mixed capabilities supported. For example, I believe WebView on MacOs has limited support to store local data.
> Unlike most email clients, Vivaldi Mail does [...]– automatically detecting mailing lists and mail threads, as well as offering a powerful search feature.
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.
I use Vivaldi for work-related browsing (one profile per client, thankfully not many clients) and in general it's very good. Vertical tabs, tab tiling + grouping, the built in markdown notepad, that's all great.
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.
I have to use Outlook with my employer and I am sorry to say that its UI went from fairly good to bad to annoying over the last decade or so. Outlook serves in many ways a good example of bad UI design but not as an reasonable mail client.
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.
Full ACK. I can't express how much Outlook annoys me today. The atrocity Outlook has become over the decades can only be a sinister ploy by MS to destroy all office productivity. I would be happy with a concise, tight UI and a rather dumb PIM -- you know, like 2002 (and don't get me started on Excel...)
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.
I keep trying to use not-Gmail, but it still Just Works (my most recent serious foray was Evolution, but I've also tried Thunderbird, mu4e inside of Emacs, and a few other TUI ones).
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.
Gmail also just works for me, and Fastmail did not. After FM killed two job interview cycles by not RSVPing to calendar invites I came to the realization that it would be unethical in the efficient altruism sense for me to not use Gmail.
I'm curious how long ago your Fastmail experience was. I've been using it lately and haven't had any issue with RSVPs (at least that I know of). I also often see people who don't RSVP to anything, so I'm surprised interviewers would see that as an issue.
That was my first thought when they mentioned how unique it was. But their claim of uniqueness is far from unique in the industry. Having grown up with computets in the '80s I have seen technologies come, the go, then come back again. Often it is because the technology of the time was not quite ready. In this case, integrated MUAs were dropped in the late '90s (if I recall correctly) because of a push for leaner and less cluttered software. The former was certainly a product of web browsers being considered as resource heavy for the time.
At this point browsers are more complicated than the operating systems we had back when browser+mail was the norm.
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.
It's 2023, using a proprietary/closed-source web browser gives me anxiety and trust issues. The fact that Vivaldi still exists is evidence that I'm a minority, but at the same time there is nothing I see over here that would compel me to give up on Firefox and whichever tab management addon I installed and forgot about.
Recently I moved my mail accounts back to Thunderbird - and wouldn't you know it, I can open new tabs there too. I can also make those tabs proper windows and use my window managers built in positioning (or lack thereof, curse Mac OS).
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.
For me a browser and mail and phone number is all equipment for Internets I have. I do not use any apps because I hate to feel used and I dream about Internets which will not require me to have a phone number again.
The feed reader seems to be enabled as part of the mail client. I don't understand. Feeds are discovered on the web and their content refers to the web. This couples them to the browser, not mail.
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.
I have been using Outlook for years as the "no bullshit" client for all the accounts I have and the biggest feature that has been missing for me is the ability to link to individual messages or threads, so I can just store links to these messages in my notes and plans instead of having to search for these messages each time.
Weird that this is not mentioned as an important feature.
I tried Vivaldi's mail client. It's not fleshed out enough. I use catch all email with Migadu whereby I can give each site a different address. No client I have found supports the mailbox thing very well, least of which Vivaldi.
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.
I want to use Vivaldi's Mail (I loved Opera Mail), but I prefer to use Firefox for browsing rather than yet another Blink engine.
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.
Vivaldi Mail checks a couple boxes, like offline access & support for almost every service provider. But no completely unique or new features. It’s interesting that they have RSS integrated as well as a Calendar but I’m not seeing what’s particularly better.
I think part of the selling point is the entire integrated experience. There are a variety of nice features and, in my opinion, design decisions that make Vivaldi enjoyable for me, having the whole experience integrated and synced as a whole is more valuable than just selecting a couple individual features. I personally don't use Vivaldi mail, but I'm still able to pick and choose while using other features I like.
Forget email, I'd prefer RSS integration, with actual aggregation happening in the cloud and new feeds being accessible in sync on several devices I own. For rarely updated feeds aggregation could be done on client.
Wake me up when they make their code forge public, and not just drop tarballs of their Chromium fork every now and then, which doesn't include any of the front-end code such as their MUA!
without considering whether these features he lists are good, this has nothing to do with browser combination? it is just about these specific features in the email client?
Perhaps there is better integration with people's workflows. It is hard to tell without actually using it. Aside from that, it very much sounds like things I already do with separate web and mail clients.
Netscape Navigator -> Sea Monkey -> Opera. It was a thing. Set aside mostly to improve performance of the browser. When Firefox was first released it seemed... lacking. But it _was_ fast. That was still the Age of IE, of course. For me, using a separate mail client turned out to be more efficient. Thunderbird worked, mostly, for a long time. I did a full immersion test of Vivaldi a while ago. Wasn't impressed enough to ditch my current setup (Firefox + Mailspring, the latter mainly for the unified inbox). It's good that people are out there trying different approaches. Monocultures are dangerous impediments to progress.
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.