Ok, so during this year I migrated off Firefox based browsers and into Vivaldi. I am still thinking it was a good idea, but as always reserving a final opinion (yes I live on the fence or try to).
If anyone else is using Vivaldi, what do you think of the integrated mail client? I hadn’t bothered setting it up (just using browser based mail) until this week, when I’m trying to assess what to setup for a Linux conversion of a friend. I think it looks pretty good, but of course this is a short-term appraisal and I’d like to know if anyone else has thoughts?
Trying to decide if I configure that for him or Thunderbird (which works fine, but seems long in the tooth these days). I guess that also brings on, ‘Should I give him Vivaldi or Firefox’ ? 
Personally, I abandoned Thunderbird in favor of the Vivaldi client, and for the second year I have not experienced any problems with it.
Long in the tooth, why is that?
Well opinionated opinion, but it is pretty darn old school and looks it’s age. It doesn’t get much love in the way of updates. In fact, it feels ‘Debian’ 
Though, I understand (regrettably) that email as a genre is pretty old-school too ;(
Agree 100%
I agree that it is “opinionated opinion”.
Thunderbird is actively developed and gets updates on a once per four weeks basis similar to that of Firefox’.
Betterbird is claimed to be thunderbird on steroids
Good point, I had forgotten Betterbird existed (despite using it for a while).
I didn’t say it was abandonware, just that it is and looks kinda dated. Software from the 2010 timeframe.
It’s great and has replaced Thunderbird for me.
I think you know the answer to that one already
I quite liked it until it wouldn’t reliably send my emails. I went back to Thunderbird which does. I also went back to Firefox as it has better ad blocking.
How? Firefox on its own has no real adblocking. One must add an extension, like uBlock Origin. Can’t you add uBlock Origin to Vivaldi?
Vivaldi lets You Tube nag about ad blocking, Firefox doesn’t. Ergo better 
Also Vivaldi is Manifest V3 which weakened ad blocking, Firefox is still Manifest V2.
Strange… There has never been a time when Vivaldi Mail has not sent an email…
Only yesterday I became convinced that where Vivaldi does not show ads, Firefox displays them 
Same here.
But Vivaldi also has it’s own built in tracker & ad blocking, which when combined with the Manifest v2 uBlock Origin is just as effective as with v3 in Firefox. I get no nagging from YouTube or anywhere else.
@MyNameIsRichard, the ad-blocking functionality included with Vivaldi is rather extensive. Including many ad-blocking sources similar to uBlock Origin.
Strange, I get a popup nagging about ad blocking and promoting YouTube Premium with both the inbuilt ad blocker and UBlock Origin in Vivaldi and not with Firefox.
You maybe need to scroll through the tracker & ad blocker options as in the screenshot from @UncleSpellbinder above and select a few more. The first time I tried Vivaldi out earlier this year I hadn’t spotted these options and went back to Firefox as it blocked more ads. Once I’d found them in Vivaldi, I switched back again and have been blissfully ad free since.
Tried it again, I just got a blank locked up window that I had to kill. Vivaldi seems to be more trouble than it’s worth to be honest. I’m goig to delete the profile and give it one more try.
Quite odd. I can’t recall having such issues with Vivaldi. 