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Opera Mail Tutorial

IMAP, Newsfeeds, and Newsgroups

Using IMAP

When you use POP, messages are left on the server and managed with a web interface or downloaded to your computer and managed by your e-mail client. With IMAP, you can use Opera Mail to manage your mail directly on the server. Since your messages are still on the server, they are accessible from other on-line connections, or offline if you have downloaded the message bodies.

If you are on line while making changes, such as marking messages as read, moving messages, or deleting them, the mail server will also make these changes. This also applies if you make changes in while offline and then connect to the mail server before exiting Opera. If you use Opera for e-mail on two different computers, you can keep them synchronized with the server and each other, or use different settings on each computer.

Opera will by default download only headers (the subject line and some other information about the message) when checking for new messages. Then, when you select a message header, Opera fetches the message body (the text and any attachments). If you use the default configuration, you must be on line in order to read your messages. If you want to read messages offline, you can change your preferences to fetch message bodies as well as headers when the system is checking for new messages.

Subscribing to IMAP folders

Opera does not automatically honor folder subscriptions. Choose Mail > IMAP folders to open the "IMAP folders dialog". Your IMAP folders will automatically appear in the Mail panel under the IMAP heading.

You can use the "Quick find" input box to quickly locate a specific folder in the subscription dialog. Use the account drop-down to change the account you are viewing folders for. Click "New account" to create a new account. Clicking on a folder name will toggle the subscription status for that folder. Click OK when finished. The folders will be added to the account access point, and messages in them will be fetched during the next check for new messages.

Folder display

Opera will display a separate heading in the Mail panel for your IMAP account. Your "INBOX" folder will be shown under this heading, and all incoming message headers from your account will be downloaded to it. As with all accounts, your messages will also show in the default views, such as Unread, Received, and Spam.

Deleting messages

Deleting IMAP messages is dealt with the same way as deleting any other message: they are moved to the Trash view and permanently removed when you empty the trash. Messages will not show in your server's Trash folder and will not appear in the deleted mail folders in other clients.

Using RSS and Atom Newsfeeds

Opera can also act as an aggregator for Atom, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication newsfeeds.

Some Web pages will offer newsfeeds using a link to the feed. Click on a link to a newsfeed in Opera, and it will be automatically recognized and added to your subscription list. Some pages will use automatic feed discovery, and will automatically tell Opera that a newsfeed is available. When Opera loads one of these pages, it shows a button in the right side of the address field. Click this button to subscribe to the newsfeed.

Once you have subscribed to a newsfeed, the Feeds menu will appear, which you can use to read and manage newsfeeds. You can also manually add a newsfeed from the "Manage newsfeeds" dialog. When you select a newsfeed from the Feeds menu, it will open a message view showing the items in the newsfeed. Each newsfeed item appears as a separate message. New items are downloaded after a set period of time (1 hour by default).

If you have also created any e-mail or newsgroup accounts in Opera, the newsfeeds will be shown in the Mail panel. Each newsfeed is displayed as a separate view. As with any message in Opera, newsfeed messages can be stored indefinitely, searched, labelled, shown in filters, forwarded, or deleted.

Using Newsgroups

Opera includes support for multiple news servers, offline reading, and easy separation between news and e-mail.

Subscribing to newsgroups

After you set up your news account, Opera will download the list of available newsgroups for that server. Note that these lists are often large--1 MB or more in size--and do not issue status reports. Click on newsgroup names to subscribe to them and click "OK" when finished.

You can subscribe to more newsgroups at a later time by going to Mail > Newsgroups to open the Newsgroups subscription dialog. Use the "Quick find" field at the top of the dialog to narrow your selection.

Reading newsgroups

By default, newsgroup messages will not show in the "Unread" view. Each news account will have its own access point in the Mail panel with a view for each newsgroup you subscribe to. The first time you access a newsgroup, it will download up to 250 headers and/or message bodies from the last posting. This is a default number and cannot be altered. For news accounts, headers only are downloaded by default. You can change this setting in the account settings.

To download new messages from a server, click the arrow on the "Check" button in the Mail panel and select your news account from the drop-down list, or open the newsgroup view and new messages will be downloaded for that newsgroup automatically.

Downloading specific messages

Opera supports the "nntp://" protocol, often used for linking to messages. Use the following syntax to download a specific message:

nntp://<newsserver>/<newsgroup>/<message range>

For example, to download the first message in the opera.general newsgroup at news.opera.com, you'd use nntp://news.opera.com/opera.general/1. To download the first through one thousandth messages, use nntp://news.opera.com/opera.general/1-1000. Message numbers are usually located in the "Xref" message header, as in "Xref: news.opera.com opera.wishlist:16983" which has the form "Xref: <newsserver> <newsgroup>:<message number>".

Since these addresses are simple URLs, you can enter them directly into Opera's address field.

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