It is not possible to send e-mail as anything other than plain text when using Opera. This means that you cannot add bold or underlined text, for example. Formatting in e-mail today is done by using HTML formatting, and Opera does not support this in outgoing e-mail. Opera can, however, display incoming HTML formatted e-mails.

((TjL adds: I don’t know of any way to set this, but it would be a good addition.))

Do you know some kind of customization for the M2 contact list ? I think that so simple…Could have more fields like Celular phone and birthday

((There are none that I know of — TJL))

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.))

This however isn’t true of Filters. Just be sure to tick “Mark Message as Filtered” under Filter Properties -> Rules, if you don’t want the same message appearing under the Received View.

Good luck sorting out the problem with multiple instances issue though.

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.

Steve

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.