Page 6 of 10 previousnext

Opera Mail Tutorial

Using Opera for E-mail

Opera uses a highly configurable three-pane interface for displaying your messages. On the left is the Mail panel which gives you easy access to all your mail and news views, gives information about server communication, and allows you to easily check and send mail or compose a new message. The top pane on the right contains a toolbar and lists the messages in the current view. The bottom pane shows the selected messages body.

Mail Panel

When there are unread messages in a view, it appears bolded with the number of unread messages indicated in brackets next to the name of the view.

Show account

By default, Opera will display all e-mail and news accounts that you set up together within the mail panel and message views. Right click on any item within your Mail panel, and select "Show messages from" to restrict the display of messages to only e-mail or news accounts, one account category, or one single account.

The "Mail accounts" and "News accounts" settings restricts message display to only e-mail accounts or newsgroup accounts respectively. Choosing one of your e-mail or news accounts will restrict message display to only that account. Using the Account category setting for an account, you can create custom account categories and then use the account selector to display messages from that category exclusively.

Status window

The status of server communications is shown at the bottom of the Mail panel. If you want more detailed information about each server, click on the arrow next to the status text. This will open a small status window where you can see what each server is doing, such as connecting, authenticating, or fetching messages.

Message Window

On top of the message window, the name of your active view is displayed on a drop-down button. Click the button to find a menu of all available views. Views with unread messages appear in bold with the number of unread messages next to them.

Message views have their own toolbar, that contains some of the most important functions for messages, like "Compose", "Reply", and "Mark as spam". There is also a dropdown button to give messages particular labels, such as "Call back", or "Funny", and the "View" dropdown button, that features multiple display options.

You may edit the toolbar by going to Tools > Appearance > Buttons > Mail and Mail view. You can then drag and drop buttons and fields to the message window toolbar.

View menu

The View button on the message window toolbar drops down a menu that gives access to some useful global settings, that is, settings that apply to all views.

The first two entries on the View menu are mutually exclusive; you select that the view should either show messages in a flat, unthreaded list or threaded according to "In-Reply-To" and "References" headers, attempting to group messages that belong to the same discussion. For contact views there are two additional options: display messages to the contact and display all messages both to and from the contact. Flat display is the default for mail views, threaded is the default for newsgroup views, and "To and from" is the default for the contact views.

Show and Period sub-menus

The sub-menu "Show" lets you select what kinds of messages should be displayed in the view you are currently in. If, for example, you would like to be able to see new newsfeed items in your Unread view, or you would like to see only unread messages for one of the mailing lists you are subscribed to, not the ones you have already seen, then use this sub-menu.

In the sub-menu "Period" you can choose whether Opera should show all messages ever received that correspond to the criteria, which is the default "Forever" setting, or simply show messages received within a specific period of time.

Display and Mark as read sub-menus

The Display sub-menu lets you set your preference of whether Opera should interpret messages as plaintext or HTML messages by default. Some messages can contain both plaintext and HTML parts. In these cases, the setting determines which part will be displayed. The default setting is to prefer HTML. If a message only contains plaintext or only HTML, that part will always be displayed. The Display sub-menu also allows you to suppress external embeds - HTML that references Web sites for items such as images and stylesheets. These items are often used in spam to detect valid e-mail addresses. As a privacy measure, the display of external embeds is disabled by default in e-mail and newsgroups.

In the same sub-menu you can determine the layout of the message view: message list only, message body only, or both message list and message body. Message list with message body below is the default layout.

The default settings also transform textual smileys into graphical ones. If you prefer not to have graphical smileys displayed in your messages, this can be switched off in the Display sub-menu.

The sub-menu "Mark as read" allows you to let messages be marked as read automatically mark after they have been selected for a specified amount of time. This setting is also global, with the exception of the Unread view.

Quick reply

The final entry on the View menu toggles the display of the small "Quick reply" window below message bodies. This is a global setting that is enabled by default.

Message list

Messages appear in three font formats:

  • Bold text in blue indicates "unseen[1]" messages. These messages are unread and have not been read in another e-mail client.
  • "Unread" messages, those you have previously viewed but not marked as read appear in black bold text
  • Messages in plain text have been marked "read"

[1] Unseen messages follow the color settings of unvisited links. This means that you can change the color of unseen messages in Tools > Preferences > Web pages > Normal link color.

The status column shows the current status of the message. Message statuses include unread, replied, sent, and redirected. The Sender/Recipient is preceded by an image indicating the state of the contact, unknown or known. You can add a custom icon for known contacts in the properties dialog for each contact. The sender/recipient column is named "From" in all views except the view for sent messages, where it is named "To". If a view is set to "To and from" message display, sent messages will be preceded by the text "To" to indicate that they are sent messages.

Offline access

You can read and compose messages offline. Go to File > Work offline to avoid Opera connecting to the Internet unless explicitly told to do so. When replying to messages offline, they are queued in the "Outbox" view. When Opera is on line again, click "Check/Send" in the Mail panel and choose "Send queued", or press Ctrl+Shift+K.

Page 6 of 10 previousnext