Opera: Opera Mail tutorial

Using advanced tips and trouble-shooting

The list below contains topics with advanced tips, information to help you trouble-shoot problems and ways to find more help for using Opera Mail.

Click to expand the text or sub-headings for each topic, or click Expand all to view all topics.

Authentication

Opera supports a variety of authentication schemes for protecting your username and password as they are sent to your mail or news server. To make account configuration easier, Opera Mail automatically tries to find the most secure authentication method your server supports. Unfortunately, this does not always work. If you are receiving authentication errors, try choosing a different authentication method for the server in the account's server properties. The authentication methods are listed in order of security, with the most secure at the top.

Authenticated for the incoming server is set to Auto by default. Auto attempts to use the most secure authentication method available first and if it fails, tries the next most secure method until one succeeds. authentication for the outgoing server is by default enabled, and set to "auto". These authentication settings only control encryption of your username and password. TLS or SSL encrypts mail data, if available. Not all servers support all methods of authentication. To change these settings, see Edit account.

Opera supports:

CRAM-MD5, APOP, login, and plaintext authentication for POP accounts
CRAM-MD5 and plaintext authentication for IMAP and NNTP accounts
CRAM-MD5, login, and plaintext authentication for SMTP accounts.

We are always interested in improving the automatic authentication negotiation. If you run into problems that are solved by changing to another authentication method, please file a bug report (including a log of client server communication) or visit one of the relevant discussions forums.

Outgoing Opera Mail problems

Relaying denied

One of the most common problems users experience when sending e-mail is a "relay access denied" error. Many ISPs are trying to fight spam by making it more difficult for spammers to send their e-mails. Outgoing mail (SMTP) servers are often configured to only allow outgoing mail from users it recognizes through a process called "SMTP authenication". If you've received a "relay access denied" error, your outgoing mail server probably requires "SMTP authenication" to send e-mails. See the above troubleshooting tip for instructions to enable "SMTP authentication".

Enabling logging

You can log incoming and outgoing server communications to a text file to send to us when filing a bug report. For more information about enabling logging, please see our knowledge base article, Activating e-mail logging in Opera.

SMTP authentication

Opera configures your mail account for SMTP authentication by default. Some SMTP servers don't support authentication. If get an error message from the server when sending mail, try disabling SMTP authentication. To disable SMTP authentication, go to the Server settings tab in account properties and change Authentication for your outgoing server to None.

Send queued messages after checking e-mail

As an additional step to fight spam, many ISPs require you to check for new e-mail before being able to send messages. Opera allows you to do this by queuing e-mail, then sending it when checking for new messages. To enable this:

Go to Tools > Mail and chat accounts.
Select the account.
Select the Outgoing tab.
Enable Queue messages and Send queued e-mail after checking e-mail.

Stand-alone Opera e-mail client

You may prefer to separate your browsing and e-mail use into two applications. To do this, use Opera's Rijk van Geijtenbeek created Hugin and Munin, Opera Mail and Opera browser configurations, respectively.

Using Hotmail with Opera Mail

Hotmail, a webmail service and part of MSN, can be accessed from Opera Mail by using one of several free third-party programs. Some of these programs are HotPOP3 and MrPostman. Opera Software does not recommend or provide customer support for any of these programs.

Random signatures

Opera does not natively support random signatures, but they are easy to set up using a sigmonster (such as KookieJar). The signature for each account is stored in the Mail sub-directory of your Opera/profile folder. Simply set your sigmonster to replace the appropriate file to change your signature. Opera re-reads the file each time the signature is needed.

Changing labels

The Labels header contains Important, Todo, Mail back, Call back, Meeting, Funny, and Valuable labels by default. If you want to change the image and/or name of a label, edit the skin.ini configuration file, which is zipped with all the skin elements and located in your Skin folder. To change a label name, edit your language file (english.lng is the default language file for English installs). You can find the relevant item to change in the table below. The numbers refer to a setting in your .lng file. Find the number and replace the text at that line to change the label text.

Label	Skin setting	Language file setting
Call back	Label Call back	26564
Funny	Label Funny	26567
Important	Label Important	26561
Mail back	Label Mail back	26563
Meeting	Label Meeting	26565
Party	Label Party	26566
Todo	Label Todo	26562
Valuable	Label Valuable	26568

Customize message reply/follow-up text

You can change the reply/follow-up text attribution line shown at the top of e-mail replies and newsgroup follow-ups. An example of this is "On Wednesday, October 27, 2004, Bob Hope <bob@example.org> wrote:" Use the accounts.ini setting and for e-mail accounts, use the "Reply=" setting, while for news accounts, use "Followup=". The following is a list and description of the available parameters:

E-mail related:: %n – Name; %e – E-mail address; %f – Name & e-mail address
Time related:: %a – Abbreviated weekday name; %A – Full weekday name; %b – Abbreviated month name; %B – Full month name; %c – Date and time representation appropriate for locale; %d – Day of month as decimal number (01 - 31); %H – Hour in 24-hour format (00 - 23); %I – Hour in 12-hour format (01 - 12); %j – Day of year as decimal number (001 - 366); %m – Month as decimal number (01 - 12); %M – Minute as decimal number (00 - 59); %p – Current local A.M./P.M. indicator for 12-hour clock; %S – Second as decimal number (00 - 59); %U – Week of year as decimal number, with Sunday as first day of week (00 - 53); %w – Weekday as decimal number, with Sunday as first day of week (0 - 6); %W – Week of year as decimal number, with Monday as first day of week (00 - 53); %x – Date representation for current locale; %X – Time representation for current locale; %y – Year without century, as decimal number (00 - 99); %Y – Year with century, as decimal number; %z – Time-zone name; %Z – Time-zone abbreviation
News-related:: %g – newsgroups
Character-related:: %% – %; \n – newline (that is, move the text following these characters to a new line)
Direct access to headers: %:Headername: (e.g. "Using %:useragent:, %n wrote:")

Syntax of the Message-ID header

The syntax for the Message-ID header sent by Opera is described below:

It will always start with "op".
The next 6 characters are a semi-base36 representation of the time_t returned from ::time() (seconds since 19700101 000000UTC).
The next two characters are semi-base36 of either the 10 least significant bits of the milliseconds time of day (for Windows) or a 10-bit random value (all other platforms).
The next 6 characters are semi-base36 of either the most significant 4 bytes of a 16-byte MD5 checksum of the From address or a random 32-bit value (if for some reason From is missing).
The contents of the Personalization account setting.
"@"
The contents of the IDNA-version of the "FQDN" account setting.

In short:

<op[seconds since 1970][millisecond|random][md5 of From:|random][personalization]@[idna-fqdn]>

(Semi-base36 is a function that will take modulo-36 of a number and convert this to a character where 'a'=0...'z'=25...'0'=26...'9'=35, and add it to the left of the already calculated string. The number is then divided by 36, and the function loops until it has given the wanted number of characters.)

Personalize the Message-ID Header

There are two settings that allow you to customize your Message-ID header:

Personalization: This setting is initially empty. You can add a short identifying string (such as "suoc" for "SomeUserOperaCom") to help to identify your messages.
FQDN: Initially set to your outgoing e-mail (SMTP) server for e-mail accounts and your news (NNTP) server for news accounts, this must be a domain name that actually exists. Many news and e-mail servers will reject messages that do not have at least one ".", or they will simply append their own FQDN.

Using these settings, you can easily create a filter to catch all messages that you have posted to a newsgroup and any replies to those messages (as long as the replier's newsreader correctly cites your message) by filtering for any messages that contain "Personalization@FQDN" in any header. For instance, if Personalization is set to "suoc" and "FQDN" is set to "news.opera.com", create a filter for "suoc@news.opera.com".

Get more help for Opera Mail

Other than this tutorial, there are several means of finding help for Opera Mail.

Opera Help

Press F1 to open Opera Help, our built-in help files.

Discussion forums

The my.opera.com forums host a Mail / News client forum, where users help each other with Opera Mail problems. The forums are moderated and often visited by Opera employees, though they are not an official customer support channel.

Newsgroups

The news.opera.com newsgroup server hosts a newsgroup, opera.mail+news, which is another place where users help each other with Opera Mail problems. Like the forums, the newsgroups are not an official customer support channel, though they are often visited by Opera employees. The Opera newsgroups are unmoderated. For more information about the Opera newsgroups, please see the on-line help for newsgroups.

Opera's knowledge base contains answers to specific problems or technical questions raised by other Opera users. You can search our knowledge base for articles on the e-mail client and news reader.