Opera Mail Tutorial

Advanced Topics

Stand-alone Opera e-mail client

Some users prefer to separate their browsing and e-mail use into two applications. For this purpose, Opera's Rijk van Geijtenbeek created Hugin and Munin, Opera Mail and Opera browser configurations, respectively.

Using Hotmail with Opera

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 Hotmail Popper, HotPOP3, and MrPostman. Opera Software does not provide customer support for nor recommend 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 will reread the file each time the signature is needed.

Message templates

Opera's Notes feature can be used to create message templates. Open the Notes panel and create a folder called, for example, "Templates". Add a new note and add the template for your message as the note text. Whenever you want to use this template, either select the note in the Notes panel and double-click it, or right-click a message composition window, and pick the template from the "Insert note" sub-menu.

Thanks to Mark Schenk for this idea.

You can also create message templates using drafts. Open a message composition window and create the message template. Then click "Save" or close the message to save it to the Drafts view.

Now, create a new custom view and name it "Templates". Check "Hide messages from other views" in its filter properties, then click "OK" to save your changes. Now you can drag your message template from "Drafts" to "Templates".

Thanks to MarcFou for this idea.

Account Settings Storage

Account settings are found in accounts.ini, located in your "Mail" directory. (Check Help > About for its exact location.) Information for each account is stored in a separate section of the configuration file. To find the relevant account section, search for your e-mail address and change settings for that account.

Note: Configuration file changes should only be made while Opera is closed.

Adding labels

A hack for adding more labels is described by one of the developers of Opera's e-mail client in a newsgroup posting. Please note that this hack is unsupported.

Changing labels

The "Labels" heading contains Important, Todo, Mail back, Call back, Meeting, Funny, and Valuable labels by default. If you would like to change the image and/or name of a label, you will need to edit the configuration file skin.ini, which is zipped with all the skin elements and located in your "Skin" folder. For name changes, 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.

Customizing message and header display

The display of message bodies and headers is controlled by the file "mime.css", located in the "Styles" directory. As the file extension implies, message bodies are styled using CSS. By default the message headers are not styled, but they may be by deleting the div.header rule in "mime.css". Message formatting uses XML, and you can view the XML used by selecting a message and pressing Ctrl + F3. This will display the source of the message in your source viewer.

Customizing message reply/follow-up text

Using an accounts.ini setting, you can change the reply/follow-up text attribution line (for example "On Wednesday, October 27, 2004, Bob Hope <bob@example.org> wrote:") shown at the top of e-mail replies and newsgroup follow-ups. For e-mail accounts, use the "Reply=" setting. For new 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.)

Personalizing 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 you identifying 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 is required to 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".

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