Vivaldi Launches Mail, Calendar, and Feed Reader

Vivaldi has taken a page from the Netscape Communicator playbook with the release of Mail, Calendar, and Feed Reader components in its web browser. They are available now in a technical preview release.

“Vivaldi Mail is about giving you the choice to communicate online in a much more organized way while having the comfort of knowing that you are in control of your data and choices,” Vivaldi’s Jon von Tetzchner writes in the announcement post. “We are excited for you to test the new Vivaldi Mail … In addition to the email client, we’ve included a feed reader and a calendar.”

According to von Tetzchner, Vivaldi has always promised to add an email client to its Chromium-based browser as a response, of sorts, to Opera dropping its own mail client. It supports IMAP and POP3 email services and the CalDav calendar service. Or, you can create an account with Vivaldi or third-party services like FastMail and “use Vivaldi Mail to get away from Google services if you wish to.”

The Vivaldi Mail client looks pretty full-featured, and the Vivaldi blog post goes into great detail about its capabilities. The Feed Reader, meanwhile, looks like a decent RSS-type reader and it of course integrates with the browser for subscribing to feeds. The Calendar, meanwhile, syncs with the Vivaldi.net calendar, or any other CalDAV calendar, including Google Calendar and Outlook.

Because this is a technical preview, these new features are not enabled by default. To enable them, visit vivaldi://experiments/ in the browser, enable the Vivaldi Mail experimental feature, and restart the browser.

“Challenges in tech today are hard especially in matters of trust, privacy, and transparency,” von Tetzchner says. “With Vivaldi Mail, Vivaldi Feed Reader, and Calendar now in preview, I am really glad that we are continuing to build that trust while we keep your choices and your data as our top priority.”

You can download Vivaldi from the Vivaldi website.