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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
It needs explicit actions for downloading attachments and images or for viewing the HTML version in 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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
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/
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.
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.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-w...
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.
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