Disable mail-feature as admin
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Hello,
the new mail-feature in Vivaldi is very nice, but in an enterprise enviroment the admin may disable it for security reasons. How can I do this? Thank you.
I asked for this several times, but the answers were not usable. I know the the user can deactivate the features by himself, but this is not the idea. The user shall not have the possibility to change/activate this feature. For this, a registry key/policy in Windows has to exist or a configuration file that ist not writeable for the user. The files features.json could be such a config-file, but it does not work as expected.
Cheers, Hans
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@hanshansen So far as I know, there is no admin ability to disable any part of Vivaldi. It's allowed on the system or it's not. It's not severable.
That said, and I don't know if this is possible or not, it may be that in a distributed installation (if that's even possible) you could use a command-line switch that blocks the specific "extension" ID that corresponds to email. But that's above my pay grade.
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@ayespy If mail uses the same extension ID as Vivaldi, you will probably stop the browser from working.
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@code3 I'm not sure it does. It may be a packed app. I'm just not clear on it.
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@ayespy Pretty sure they are the same. Really, Vivaldi seems to ignore more special use cases, like DevTools or Admin Policies.
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@code3 Well, Vivaldi's devtools pretty much had to be mostly custom-written, and it is not set up at present, as far as I know, for Admin Policies under distributed installation. Or at all, really. It would require a lot more hooks.
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Users can install Vivaldi without admin rights. So, I would suggest not to let users to touch the computer. They just make trouble.
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@ayespy In former versions of Vivaldi, these lines in feature.json disabled the email-feature:
"calendar_mail_feeds": { "friendly_name": "Calendar, Mail & Feeds.", "description": "Enables Calendar, Mail & Feeds. Requires a restart of Vivaldi to be active.", "value": false, "internal_value": false
For the file feature.json is not writeable to the user, he cannot change it. But the entry does not work anymore...
Cheers, Hans
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@hanshansen Still worth noting if users can set up their own instance of Vivaldi however they wish. And obviously, they can run not only Vivaldi, but any kind of software. Even 'ordinary' browsers can run arbitrary codes including e-mail clients. Concentrating on disabling one specific piece of software out of the infinitely many possible is just pointless. It can make users' life harder, but by no means improves security. If you are worried about non-compliant clients, then set up your e-mail servers to verify clients accordingly.
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@HansHansen I agree with @Zsul : unless you can control what software the users can or can't install (and some places do), it's very hard to guarantee that everyone will use it the way you want to. If you don't want people using an email client, then block the POP/SMTP/IMAP services from being used.
For instance, whenever I'm connected to my company's VPN I know Vivaldi mail will stop fetching email because that traffic is not being allowed out.
I never tried to use it to connect to my company's email (I don't want to mix things at that level) but if I did I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't accepting it because it's not Outlook...
And other stuff like that. -