30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover

On April 29, 2005 at 08:37 AM, Daniel wrote:

But if I wanted to use email from opera I would have to pay for it wouldn't I, where as GMail is free. Isn't this just like using Outlook Express for your existing email accounts?

On April 29, 2005 at 10:27 AM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

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.

On April 29, 2005 at 10:59 AM, Michel wrote:

I think the question was about opera's webmail, whose premium accounts are paid.
No, you don't need to use it. M2 supports any e-mail service that provides pop3.

On April 29, 2005 at 01:14 PM, Peter Karlsson wrote:

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.

On April 29, 2005 at 01:53 PM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

Peter: oops! That's right. I've added that as a saner option :-)

On April 29, 2005 at 04:10 PM, aaa wrote:

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

On April 29, 2005 at 04:37 PM, Coy Lay wrote:

I have just upgraded to Opera 8. At some time in the past I configured away the email preview split screen. I've looked and looked but can't find a way to get it back. Can you help me?

On April 30, 2005 at 09:25 AM, tothaa wrote:

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

On April 30, 2005 at 09:31 AM, toth balab wrote:

no html message sending available :'(

On April 30, 2005 at 11:12 AM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

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*).

On April 30, 2005 at 11:21 AM, hnyyes wrote:

I just fell onto this site, not sure about it, but am tryin it anyway, so far haven't had problems, I just sent an e-mail to someone, so we will see.

On April 30, 2005 at 11:27 AM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

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

On April 30, 2005 at 04:42 PM, maveriick wrote:

It would be nice if Opera had an "Calendar" component. I would love to see the Opera mail client integrated with the *Calendar component*. I am a recent opera convert having done tried IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Konqueror along the way. The calendar component will make me remove the others

On April 30, 2005 at 06:31 PM, Julio wrote:

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

On May 01, 2005 at 02:12 AM, Farago wrote:

First of all: congratulations! opera 8 is really great!
There are, however, some reasons why I am not using M2 at the moment:

* although opera 8/M2 can also be installed on a USB stick (great!), I couldn't find any option to download mails WITHOUT the attachments. And, as you know, space is precious on a USB stick.

* there is no option for a receiver receipt

* I would LOVE to use M2 for my GMail account, however, (1) the M2's thread view is not fully compatible with Gmail's threads (2 replies viewed at the most), (2) I couldn't find any option to ad my signature to my mails automatically and (3) (this does not so much refer to M2) the IMAP feature cannot be used since Gmail only offers POP support.

I am confident that these features (and more) will be included as the development of M2 proceeds since I think that a great team is working on this project.
Thanx and all the best, Farago.

On May 01, 2005 at 08:58 AM, arjen wrote:

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.

On May 01, 2005 at 01:15 PM, Peter Karlsson wrote:

aaa: I have also seen the "E-mail and chat accounts disabled", in a version installed over a previous version. If you disabled the "Show e-mail account" in a previous version, you will not be able to create any e-mail account in Opera 8.0 until you enable it again. The problem is that the setting for that was removed from the preferences dialogues.

What you need to do is to open your opera6.ini file (you can find the location by going to "Help" -> "About" and look in the "Paths" section. Exit Opera and open the file in Notepad. Now look for the line "Show E-mail Client=0", and remove it.

Hopefully, that should fix the problem.

On May 02, 2005 at 06:41 AM, Richard Grevers wrote:

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!

On May 02, 2005 at 07:24 AM, Batman wrote:

The main thing about gmail is the threaded view with conversations - it's much more usable than opera mail (which I use). Also the fact that people instantly take to Gmail and not M2 speaks volumes about how usable and intuitive they both are

On May 02, 2005 at 12:01 PM, Robert wrote:

Can M2 mail be encrypted using PGP?

On May 02, 2005 at 04:36 PM, Frenzie wrote:

I'm considering adding cookies (read: reminders and everything to it) to my Calendar. But using it in combination with M2 is an impossibility. :)

On May 03, 2005 at 04:22 AM, Richard Grevers wrote:

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 :-)

On May 04, 2005 at 08:12 AM, mastertet wrote:

Thanks for the good information about Opera!

Is it possible to start Opera with email view? Ideally, I would like to have an email icon that put me in M2 when I click on it. And the best would be that when I click on it for the first time, I get Opera Mail setup tool popuped...

Is it possible?

On May 04, 2005 at 01:27 PM, luv_opera wrote:

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.

On May 04, 2005 at 04:36 PM, nullacht15 wrote:

@luv_opera: You can import mails from Mozilla using the Netscape6/7 option - it worked for me

On May 05, 2005 at 11:39 PM, barev wrote:

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.

On May 06, 2005 at 04:56 AM, Richard Grevers wrote:

Barev,
A full rewrite of the IMAP back-end has been taking place. Since 'near enough' isn't good enough for email, it seems to have been held back for an 8.x release, although a preview that was released during the 8 beta period seemed much improved.

On May 07, 2005 at 08:47 AM, barev wrote:

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.

On May 24, 2005 at 11:17 AM, Flavio Suárez wrote:

Coy Lay:
Just press "i" or go to View button -> Show and select the mode you want!

tothaa:
press Ctrl + F12 (preferences) and in the first tab uncheck "Show close button on each tab"

Farago:
(yet) there isn´t any option to download mails WITHOUT the attachments.
Go to the "Tools" menu and select "E-mail and chat accounts".
Double click your account and then click on the "Outgoing" tab. As Tim said on this
same page: "You may want to edit/change/delete the default signature. For no signature, just delete the entire contents of the box."

On May 24, 2005 at 11:34 AM, Flavio Suárez wrote:

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.

On June 07, 2005 at 06:46 PM, Paul wrote:

Is it possible to import Opera 7.x emails into Opera 8?

On June 08, 2005 at 02:41 PM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

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)

On July 22, 2005 at 02:53 PM, Astron wrote:

I have been using Opera (the browser) for some 6 years now, and love the customization, speed and flexibility it offers. 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. For example, I am not able to do the following -

1) 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.

2) I cannot control the mail font size, style, etc

3) Clearly separate newsfeeds and email.

If Opera is in fact able to do these, please (PLEASE !) email me at astranomina@gmail.com

On July 22, 2005 at 09:17 PM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

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.

On August 01, 2005 at 04:43 PM, Gerrit P. Haase wrote:

I'm long term TheBat! user and I think all programmers writing email applications should use TheBat! as their main mailer. It has so many features like templates, macros and much, much more. However IMAP support is bad or broken, I cannot use it in my setup, so I started to use Mozilla a year ago because the IMAP support in Mozilla is very good. However, I hate Mozilla as browser, it is slow and bloated, so I decided to give Opera a try. I think before buying it I want also to try it for mailing and see if it is possible to use it instead of TheBat! and/or Mozilla. IMAP seems to work ok, have not tested POP3 but I guess it will work ok too.



Now I'm want just all the same features than I'm using in Mozilla, would not be fair to compare Opera to a standalone mailer like TheBat! But in the first steps I stumbled. I hit "Reply-To" and see a line like this:



"On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:52:17 +0200, Prename Surname <prename@domain.com> wrote:"



Wow, this is bad. I want to have it like this:

Prename Surname wrote:



I don't think it is a good idea to include useless information in my reply, and the only use to include the email address in replies is for harvesters who collect email addresses in mail archives from public mailing lists. If it is no mailing list posting it is useless in the first place since the person who gets this email knows her own address very well. Also the date is useless IMO, I have a good mailer who lets me display the thread or sorted by subject so this is useless information in the email body too.



However, there is no possibility to configure this in Opera, it is possible to customize this with Mozilla and even more options to customize this line with TheBat! I cannot find anything in the documentation and find nothing on the web after a short search, just pages like this are showing up (very helpful btw.). I found that there is a line in the language file that is used to build this Reply-To header line:

; Attribution-line when replying to a mail

67009="On %:Date:, %f wrote:"



Now I'm searching for documents where the placeholders available are explained, %f is the complete "From:" content, sure, but I want only the name without the email address.



E.g. with TheBat! it is even possible to rebuild the quoting the way Outlook does it, here my template for this:

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

Von: %OFROMNAME [mailto:%OFROMADDR]

Gesendet: %ODATE %OTIME

An: %OTOLIST

Cc: %OCCLIST

Betreff: %OSUBJ



<<%OATTACHMENTS>>



%TEXT



And this on a per contact basis! So where are all these features? Not included in Opera? Even customizing the single line seems to be impossible, every newsreader and mailer I used in ten years has options to customize this line, why not Opera M2?

{{TjL writes:
A couple of replies: To the overall question, no this isn’t available and no I don’t know why.

However, any decent mailing list will a) not allow public archival and b) not put harvestable email addresses in the archive anyway. Look at the archives for lists you are on and you will probably see they have spam-proofed them as much as possible. The date isn’t useless IMO because it can help pinpoint which message is being replied to - imagine a thread with 3 people responding and 20 messages in the thread. Having a datestamp can be helpful if you want to see the full text of the original message.

That said, I’m a big fan of customization, and wish that Opera Mail allowed people to customize it more than it does.

That said, I used TheBat! and found it way too overwhelming for me (not to mention it isn’t available for Mac) and I will never ever forgive TheBat for breaking the since-the-beginning-of-time email standard of "Re:" by adding "Re[2]:" and such by default and inflicting great pain on mailing lists around the world. "Re:" is "Re:" and should not be mucked around with. For what it’s worth...}}

On August 01, 2005 at 04:48 PM, Gerrit P. Haase wrote:

@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}}

On August 19, 2005 at 05:24 PM, Steve wrote:

TjL: great tutorial, but I get the impression you don't use M2 as your email client?

Which one do you use, Why? Why not M2?

I use Opera Mail -M2 but I also use others...eg PocoMail, ThunderBird, The Bat..even Outlook (Express)... (Seaching for the ultimate e-mail client).
But, I must say, I really like M2..and will like it even better when it can compose html emails etc... Too bad also it doesn't have a more standard address book (eg like Poco) and/or has better import/export tools...

Opera itself is my default browser..except when I am forced to use FireFox (eg to get full functionality with GMail, other Google products etc)

Steve

On August 20, 2005 at 02:43 PM, TjL wrote:

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.

On August 21, 2005 at 05:12 AM, Steve wrote:

Thanks for your reply TjL - much appreciated.

Steve

On October 01, 2005 at 10:40 AM, Bart Schouten wrote:

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.

On October 12, 2005 at 11:58 PM, Johnathan wrote:

Although labelling a message won't get rid of it from your Received View.

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.