Opera

Opera Mail Quick Start Guide

Opera Mail is different from most other e-mail clients. It organizes your messages for you, and it has an indexing engine which allows for lightning-fast searches, making it easy to retrieve old messages. When you get used to working with Opera Mail, you will ideally find yourself with more time to read and reply to your messages, because you spend less of your time organizing them.

Comparison

Traditional e-mail client	Opera
Uses folders	Uses views
Messages are stored in different folders.	Messages are stored in one central location.
Messages are copied or moved to folders.	Views contain links to messages, not the messages themselves.
All messages end up in the inbox by default.	Messages are filtered and sorted automatically.
A message remains in your inbox when read, unless you move it to another folder.	A message is unread until you mark it as read, and is then hidden from this view.
Slow searches due to folders.	Lightning-fast searches due to indexing engine.

How Views Work

Using Opera's message views is a bit like wearing colored glasses. Put on green glasses and all the other colors are still there, but you will only see green. Similarly, Opera's "Attachments > Images" view shows only messages with image attachments. All your messages are stored in the same place, but the views allow you to see messages matching certain criteria displayed together without moving messages around.

Dragging and dropping a message will therefore not remove it from other views, but it tells Opera to add a link to that message so that it will be displayed in the specified view. If you delete a message from a view, it will appear in the Trash view. When deleted from the trash, the message is deleted from all views.

Organizing your messages

From your first run, Opera will sort your messages automatically as they come in. Below is the default set of e-mail views in Opera, some of which are only created when matching messages are found:

• Unread: Unread messages appear here until marked as read.
• All messages
  • Received: All your messages are shown here by default.
  • Outbox: Queued messages ready to be sent are shown here.
  • Sent: Sent messages are shown here.
  • Drafts: Unsent messages you are working on are saved here automatically.
  • Spam: Spam filter that learns from the messages you add to and remove from the view.
  • Trash: Deleted messages appear here. To permanently delete a message, you have to empty the trash.
• Active contacts: Contacts you have recently corresponded with are shown here.
• Active threads: Shows discussion threads you have recently participated in.
• Labels: Messages you give a label can be accessed here.
• Attachments: Messages with attachments appear here.
• Mailing lists: Messages from mailing lists appear here.

To learn more about using Opera for newsgroups and newsfeeds, please consult the tutorial page News and newsfeeds.

The Unread and Received views

Opera has no traditional inbox, only a view that shows unread messages according to your preferences—you may for instance choose whether or not to display mailing list messages, spam and other filtered messages in your Unread view. When a message is marked as read, it disappears from this view.

"Received" is set to display all messages that you have received, read and unread, by default. Like Unread, you can limit the kinds of messages that should be displayed in this view.

Contacts are views

Contacts are found in the "Contacts" panel, and they also work as views to the e-mail archive. When you click the name of a contact, all correspondence with that contact is shown.

Fast searches

When you are looking for something in particular from your e-mail archive, Opera's indexing engine lets you search through your messages and get the results instantly, even with thousands of messages. Use the "Start search" field in the mail panel to search through all your messages. The search will be saved in the mail panel as a view for simple future access.

You can also use the quick find field in mail view pages to search messages in that view and watch them being sorted as you type.

Custom filters

To create your own filtered view, right-click anywhere in the Mail panel and select "New filter". You can create rules to filter incoming messages automatically, and you can drag and drop messages from other views to tell Opera that you want those messages to appear in this view. You can also set Opera to learn from messages added to and removed from the view, and filter messages automatically based on this. The more you train the filter, the more accurate it will be. The spam filter is set to learn by default.

To remove a message from a filter, select it and press Ctrl + X on your keyboard, or right-click and select "Remove from view". Moving a message from a view does not send it to trash, it simply removes the link to it from that view.

Accounts and account groups

By default, Opera shows all messages from all accounts. You can set Opera to show messages from one account or a group of accounts. Right click on any item in the mail panel and select Show messages from. Accounts can also be organized into categories. Go to Tools > Mail and chat accounts, select an account and click "Edit". You will find a field/dropdown where you can either enter a new category name, or choose from existing categories.

Further reading

• Opera Mail product information
• Opera Mail help
• Mail tutorial