Day 11: Opera Mail (M2)

Daniel: if you want to use Opera without ads then you need to register Opera. Your email, however, will not be examined to place ads in it, so some may consider Opera’s free email to be more secure than GMail. Like everything else in life, there are trade-offs.

I’m not sure what you mean by the Outlook Express reference.

About how to set up the account: You usually don’t have to go deep down into the preferences to set up an e-mail account, going to the “Tools” menu and selecting “E-mail and chat accounts” should usually be enough.

mail and chat in my tools menu is disabled, help!!

it is the same as the previous version, except for a bug: with double click i cannot minimalize the tabs :(

Toth: Some consider that one of Opera Mail’s biggest features (no HTML) but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in Opera Mail eventually (sigh).

tothaa: that may have to do with your window handling preferences. Hopefully someone else will reply.

I agree with Toth and the whole HTML ordeal. Toth, need not worry for I am sure it will be worked out. Peace…

As for a calendar component for Opera, the closest available I can think of is:

http://frans.clearphp.com/calendar/

It’s a calendar within Opera, but not integrated with M2.

Daniel, using Opera for mail is a lot different from using Outlook Express:

You cannot be infected by a virus just by previewing a message in Opera, all forms of scripting are disabled when viewing HTML emails, “Webbots” (small images with unique names which identify you and have to be fetched from some spammer’s server) are disabled by default.

In addition, Opera follows the mail protocols correctly and doesn’t break quoting when you reply to messages, and automatically trims signatures when relying. Quite a difference!

Can M2 mail be encrypted using PGP?

Batman, did you mean Opera webmail (rather than M2)?

Possibly the reason people haven’t tried to use GMail like a conventional folder based mail client is that there’s nothing that looks like a folder, whereas M2 users default OS folder icons in the UI, which might have set some expectations.

Interestingly, complaints about M2’s threading stopped dead when GMail arrived. Perhaps users saw that threading can be a lot worse than what they get in M2 :-)

I used Opera v.6.05 for years for browsing & email. Currently use Mozilla v.1.7.2 for same and want to change over to Opera 8. Successfully upgraded from Opera 6.05 but found no way to import the email and bookmarks from Mozilla 1.7.2 into Opera8. Any help will be appreciated! Thanks.

Hi! I am a big Opera fan and I am using this browser since version 6. However there is one thing in Opera that I really do not like. I am very intrigued by the idea to use only one application for both browsing and e-mail but unfortunately I am unable to do that with Opera because the IMAP support even in version 8 is awfull. Do not get me wrong, I’d love to use Opera, but I am unable to do my job with it that is why I am forced to use Thunderbird, which I do not like, but it works fine with IMAP. I work for a hosting company and we receive thousands of e-mails per day. I’ve tried using M2 many times but it seems it really cannot deal with such amount of e-mail over the IMAP protocol. It constantly looses connection with the server and stops fetching the new messages. I really wonder why the Opera developers still haven’t fixed that, although it is reported as a major bug along time ago. Nevertheless my favourite browser will always be Opera and when IMAP support for M2 is finally fixed that would be the perfect Internet Suite for me.

Thanks for the answer. Nice to hear that. I am looking forward to using my favourite browser for e-mail, too. I hope that would be soon.

Tim, a tip:

If you uncheck the “Check for new messages” check box, this account don´t will be checked when you launch Opera.

A trick I use for a 4-levels hierarchy of mail accounts:

Level 1 (VERY important mail account - automatic checking):

“Check for new messages” checked, timer = 5 minutes and “Include this account when checking manually” checked.

Optionally, you could check the “Play sound …” option also.

Level 2 (important mail account - automatic checking):

“Check for new messages” checked, timer = 35 minutes and “Include this account when checking manually” checked.

Optionally, you could check the “Play sound …” option also.

Level 3 (not so important mail account - only checked manually with Check/Send or Ctrol+K):

“Check for new messages” UNCHECKED, timer = minutes and “Include this account when checking manually” checked.

Level 4 (not important mail account - only checked manually checking the specific account):

“Check for new messages” UNCHECKED, timer = minutes and “Include this account when checking manually” UNCHECKED.

There is no UI option to import mail from Opera 7 into Opera 7 or Opera 8.

The only way to do it is to copy the Mail directory.

You can also import the *.mbs files but you will have to reconfigure filters and the index will have to be re-created.

(Thanks to Tim Altman for the tip)

I recently made an attempt to switch to Opera mail (IMAP) from pine (!), and am a tad disapppointed about the lack of customization options for the mail client that ships with Opera.

PINE is nearly the ultimate in customizability. You’ll be hard pressed to find any mail client that gives you as much customization power. I used PINE for years and have never found another mail client that could do as much as easily. However, there are drawbacks which is why I use a GUI mail client now. Life is full of tradeoffs.

I want to jump to a specific folder in the IMAP folder structure when I open my email - I do not want Opera to open with the Unread folder.

As far as I know this cannot be done.

i cannot control the mail font size, style, etc

That is possible. Edit the mime.css file and/or the Advanced preferences and look for, unsurprisingly, the section labeled “fonts”

Clearly separate newsfeeds and email.

This cannot be done and I hope it will be added in the future. I don’t use Opera for mail at all but do use RSS. Right now they are fairly integrated and I don’t expect it will change any time soon.

@TjL

Try TheBat! if you want more customizability.

However I don’t know if the IMAP support is better in recent releases, the last time I tried it was not working for me which doesn’t mean that it will not work for you.

G.

{{TjL writes: See other comment about my experience with TheBat! but most importantly they don’t have a Mac version}}

Steve - You are correct. I don’t use M2. I have gone full circle with M2. I initially thought that having a mail client was a bad idea (waaay back when). Then I decided that M2 was the most amazing mail client ever. As far as searching goes, you just can’t beat it. I love some of the simple things like being able to press ‘e’ and have every message to/from the current contact. It’s a feature I wish every other mail client had.

The reasons I don’t use M2 are fairly involved, and not all of them are reasons that would matter to others, but in no particular order:

First is that I use IMAP exclusively, and M2 has some IMAP issues (a new IMAP engine is supposed to be coming, hopefully soon).

I remember telling someone “I want Opera’s mail searching capabilities for the entire operating system!” Well, Spotlight from Apple is the closest thing that exists today. To use Spotlight for email, I need to use Apple’s Mail program. Hopefully someday any mail program will work with Spotlight, but as soon as I heard about Spotlight, I knew that it was too powerful not to use. So that’s the second reason.

The third reason is that M2 adheres very strictly to the requirement to use “format=flowed” to get quoting done properly. I’m all for standards, but I also live in the real world. Here in the real world, there are a lot of mail clients that don’t use format=flowed properly, so when M2 replies to one of those messages, you get a long line, then a short line, and a long line, and a short line. That looks terrible, and I refuse to use a mail client that makes me look bad. So I would have to manually reformat the replies, which took time.

PINE has a way to select a piece of text and re-flow it. If Opera would implement something similar, I would happily go back to it. (PINE is also one of the best mail programs I’ve ever used.)

The fourth reason is the problem of having to rebuild indexes and losing message labels. This is something I expect will be improved in the future, and again is probably exacerbated by the fact that I do such extensive alpha and beta testing on unreleased versions, but I have heard other people have problems with this too.

The fifth reason is that there are times I want to be able to ignore my email completely, and if I have my browser open and see that I have unread messages, it is going to distract me. For that simple reason, having separate apps works better for me. Plus, because I am on a slow dialup connection at home, there are times when I just want to jump online to check a website, and not worry about mail trying to get downloaded at the same time. Opera needs a separate “Work Offline” setting for email and web for this to happen.

The final reason is another technical one. As I mentioned, I use MacOpera. Unlike Windows and Unix, MacOpera lacks a way to separate installations from one another. This probably isn’t a big deal to most people, but without going into details that would violate my NDA with Opera ASA, it is pretty much of a giant pain in the gluteus maximus for someone who installs a slew of new builds on a regular basis.

In Windows, I could have one installation that was my “working/stable” version (usually the latest publicly available version), and then an endless number of other installations to test. For example, my old Windows box has over 40 different versions of Opera installed. Because I use IMAP, I could read/delete mail from any installation but always knew that I could back to my security-blanket installation that was Operating (ha ha, get it ;-) in a safe zone that wouldn’t be corrupted by any other versions.

So those are the reasons that I don’t use M2. Most of these are technical (and by “technical” I mean fairly high-level geeky). I still think M2’s search features are second-to-none. If I still used Windows, I would absolutely still be using M2 (although I’d be complaining about the lack of a reformat command (see #3 above).

I hope that makes it a bit more clear. Because of several unique aspects of my situation, I feel comfortable recommending M2 for most people even though I am not using it myself.

I’ve been using Opera for quite some while now, and have been using M2 since version 7 or so. It has always worked for me but what I never liked was the lack of transparancy to its working. There is so much that can’t be done, such as moving email imported from a .mbs into the Sent folder. These folders are magical; only to be updated by Operas procedures. The fact that all mail is stored in one big chunk, the “Received” folder, and that all mail remains visible in that list for ever until deleted, is also annoying. I would like to have some basic “real” folder support, and then apply filters to them. The best of both worlds, I’d say. As it is now, I can filter all my messages for, say, Work, and put them in a nice new view, but I’d still be also seeing them turn up in the “Received” list. Perhaps a function “List all mail that is not part of another view” would do the trick? But that would then also complicate matters, and customization would be the first thing people would yell for. As I believe now, a basic folder mechanism; such as used in IMAP, is quite much needed. Unfortunately, as mentioned before on this page, IMAP support is in its infancy - yet, at least.

This brings me to the reason for writing this piece of comment. I’ve been using Opera both in Windows and in Linux, and that’s quite nice. They share the same profile and Mail folders, so the interoperability is just great. But some days ago, I accidentally opened two instances in Linux. Both tried to read and write mail. (Or I did in both ;)). As a result, there was one mail that was deleted in the one, but still showed up in the other, and on the next screen-update it appeared as an empty line. Now, my mail just won’t come in anymore. There is new mail on my mail server, but I can’t get Opera to even see it. Deleting the cache file doesn’t help.

So, this faced me with the sheer impossibility (?) of manually editing some files, whether they be cache files or the Sent mail folder - if at all it exists somewhere. It would have helped if there was some repair tool. But alas.

I’m now conviced that I either need good backup procedures, like, every day, or a decent structure that is less prone to damage. That can keep my files organised in the long run and that can allow me to switch clients if necessary. Some structure or organisation that is not dependent on the proprietary format of some application. Suppose you had electronic file-drawers in your office, that would stop functioning if the supporting company quit their support. You would lose all data! Or paper, that can only be read if you use a certain type of glasses that can be bought at only one company and when that one goes bankrupt, you’re done with. I think we need to keep our needs as close to ourselves as possible, eliminating dependencies as much as possible. I do believe using Opera M2 is a good thing for functionality, but it should support more this notion of indepence of others. If this would be the vision, as it is of Opera Software ASA regarding open standards concerning protocols and the like, there would certainly be more support for some notion of user control over the mail database.

I’ve spent a few hours fussing with M2 and I find that M2 obfuscates my work flow.

As a browser, I love 8.5. What would be the possibility of giving 8.6 users a choice of M2 or the older Opera6 email client? That would be a winner. OR Is there a hack that would allow 8.5 to call up the 6.0 email client?

((TjL writes: None that I know of.))

After much reading on the tutorial, which is great, I either zoned out and missed it or the answer to my question isn’t here. So, what I need to know is how to ensure that Opera’s M2 inline email client will be my default email client. Thanks. Owen

Hi, Opera M2 cant send html mails. How i can send this emails with opera?