Opera launches Opera Mail web app | Hacker News Reader

Opera launches Opera Mail web app

my.opera.com

75 pointsjannes59 comments

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Turns out I have an Opera account so I logged in. It's much more simplistic than Gmail:

- it's 1GB, so too small for me

- no settings page (or can't find it)

- no filters

- no labels

- no automatic signature

- no multiple stars (but there's a pin)

- doesn't seem to auto-save contacts

- isn't completely AJAX, the Mail and Contacts tabs reload the page

- ugly colors (email headers are purple)

So, this isn't a Gmail competitor for power-users at this point.

It's Opera Mail 1.0(or whatever), not a carbon copy of Gmail. Better to launch with less features and see which direction to take the product.

Release early, release often. The best strategy for a new product.

Gmail was 1GB to start out, and people thought that was enormous.

Because at the time the standard was 4MB. Gmail has raised the bar permanently.

Things have changed quite a bit since 2004. The competition back then only offered a few mb.

I am currently only using about 200 MB for my personal account, so this would be fine for me. I have emails going back ten or so years, but those are thing I purposely kept. I never really bought into Google's assertion that I should never delete anything and just use search to find what I need. I understand that some people have way more than 1 GB of mail, but for me and other email users like me the amount of space opera is offering will last for years to come.

It is based on Fastmail.fm (which Opera purchased). I have been using (and paying) fastmail for years. I can highly recommend them.

I had been using fastmail for years too, but recently switched to gmail ironically.

10+ years ago I payed a small fee for life time account with them, and they very were good, but they just never made any improvements to their service and gmail just got better and better to the point it seemed ridiculous to keep using fastmail.

"they just never made any improvements to their service"

I've observed the opposite. They constantly make improvements to their service.

They've got boatloads of features and they're getting better all the time.

If you guys can bring up examples, that would be helpful to the rest of us...

The account I bought initially had 15 MB space limit (it was a 15$ one time purchase for life membership). They never increased this limit... The web interface didn't auto refresh, unless you used "poll" which then only refreshed every 30 minutes.

When I did switch there was a bug in the forwarding that resulted in some of my emails not forwarding (although this went away and only happened to 3 emails).

They might have had better improvements for accounts that required continuous payment, but certainly not mine. It obviously got surpassed by free alternatives.

Despite this criticism, I am very satisfied with fastmail, they served me well for a long time.

Be aware that all mail deliveries in Norway (who you send the mail to, and receive the mail from) will be surveilled and available to law enforcement by court order. Obviously most of you are from the US, and are already used to these kind of shenaningans, but just thought that I should warn you, as the mail servers for this service will most probably be located in Norway. Read more about it here: http://www.tnp.no/2233-controversial-data-storage-directive-...

Fastmail.fm, the company that has been bought by Opera ASA to provide Webmail states that "Our main servers are located at NYI in New York City, USA." A geoip lookup of the hosts in the header of a test e-mail confirms this.

Yeah, I was suspecting that much after posting my comment. Thanks for clearing that up :)

It doesn't change your warning though, does it?

"Be aware that all mail deliveries in Norway (who you send the mail to, and receive the mail from) will be surveilled and available to law enforcement by court order."

If you think your email won't be surveilled just because your email service provider is not in the US, you could have a big surprise in store for you.

Email can be snooped anywhere between its source and its destination. That can include many hops (some even through the US, depending on where it's going).

If you're really concerned about privacy, you should be using encryption and maybe even anonymous remailers.

I want to use this and I can manage with the clunky interface, the small storage and I don't need too many features, but I really hate the "viral" sentences added after the message, I thought that one ended with Hotmail. People can figure out from my email address domain where to look if they want a similar account.

"http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an unladen european swallow"

Seriously, I don't want to spam everyone I know with tired inside-jokes.

Fastmail has always been aimed more at paying users than free ones. The taglines go away with anything above the free acount.

> I thought that one ended with Hotmail.

It did, and was reborn with the BlackBerry and iPhone era.

  --
  Sent from my PC

Very interesting - and fast. I won't be using it, before they implement a second layer of authenticators, though.

Google have always done their best to thwart Opera browsers from using their service, and this is a great response.

I'd like to know how fast Gmail is for Apps customers compared to the free version, though.

I'm wondering what you mean when you say that Google have done their best to thwart Opera users from using Gmail. Is this commonly accepted as true?

Gmail and other services have run very poorly in the past - and when Google isn't recommending Opera users to use a supported or modern browser, they outright block the user string of the browser directly or indirectly[1]. I don't know if Opera's JS execution was just so abysmal that Google Reader and Gmail couldn't run at all in their first years, or what went on.

I had some more bookmarks on this, but I don't know where they are at the moment. Maybe I've misplaced them, or Opera sync botched something. I'll see if I can find some of them tomorrow.

[1]: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/09/08/google-instant

"when Google isn't recommending Opera users to use a supported or modern browser, they outright block the user string of the browser directly or indirectly"

Opera can mask itself as another browser. I've used this feature to circumvent some Google annoyances aimed at Opera.

Gmail now works very well on Opera with no performance problems or browser incompatibility warnings.

That's probably the most convoluted sign-up process I've seen in a while.

On the landing page, they ask for an email address, and the hint is "you@myopera.com". So I enter "me@myopera.com" since they must be asking what I want my Opera address to be.

Nope. The next page puts that email in a username field, with another email address field below it, and a password field.

OK, so what kind of email address do they want now? A confirmation address? Crap. me@myopera.com is an invalid username. Hmm, maybe I'm supposed to put "me" in the username field and me@myopera.com in the email field.

Great, they sent a confirmation email to me@myopera.com, which I just created and evidently can't use until I confirm the email address.

Fuck it. Back to Gmail.

Honestly, how hard is this?

  1. "Sign up" link
  2. Username
  3. Password
  4. Done. Show me my inbox with my email address prominently displayed somewhere.

We're not an entire webmail service (just mail scheduling), but the Momentomail ( http://www.kymalabs.com) signup process was so short we were getting complaints that people didn't know what was happening.

1. Click login 2. If you have a google account hit "allow" 3. Done.

There's something to be said about keeping to user's expectations about common processes. Due to simply not needing it at this point in our product, our process is still "weird" compared to a normal signup process, but seems to have a much higher success rate in getting people to work through the process.

Hopefully opera will iterate a little and resolve this.

I'm not having the best experience. I sent an e-mail TO my new opera e-mail address and it bounced. I sent an e-mail OUT OF my new opera e-mail account and it failed "Bad Request: User [masked] was not found."

It looks very simple, definitely too simple. From what I hear Gmail looked like this at first, the visible features were later.

While their email service looks simple yet polished, their success will depend on how well they fight spam and the features that they offer (priority inbox etc)

I disagree, it will depend on their ability to put the product in front of users. The "techy" crowd might care about features, but few of the 500m+ (?) MSN users will.

Casual users like to ask power users for help. And non-techies can become picky for something that they use every day.

Nowadays changing email address is really difficult. (At least in my case) Because you are already in everyone's address book with your existing email.There has to be something superior, crucial to make you switch your email.

Gmail's success, i guess, was because it was offering something which no one had when it was first introduced. A huge space and ajax. It was even considered cool to have a "gmail" when you could create accounts with invitations only.

Maybe opera mail is fast, maybe it looks nice, maybe it is simpler. But i dont think it has a key factor which would make you switch from email you currently are using.

And i didnt like the big "My Opera" button. Intuitively it should go right into your inbox, but it doesn't.

In case of gmail, it leads right into ur inbox. Back to gmail

Nowadays changing email address is really difficult. (At least in my case) Because you are already in everyone's address book with your existing email.

This is why your "public" email address(es) should really be something you control. It's worth buying your own domain name if just for this reason. Then you can switch backend providers without having to worry about giving everyone you know your new email address.

I have often wondered, how do you go about this? A few tips from fellow hackers would be welcomed :)

Easiest way would be Google Apps for domains, you just enter DNS settings on your domain to use it:

https://www.google.com/a/

They have setup instructions for most domains providers.

Once you've got that ready you can change at any time to another service or your own mail server by changing the DNS settings.

I use Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) for all the mailboxes on my own domains. Cheap, good spam filters, extremely reliable, GREAT support. It's just $2/month per mailbox (with a $10/month minimum) and you don't have to point the whole domain to them, just the MX records so their servers handle your mail.

As others have mentioned, there are several options (Google Apps for Domains, FastMail.FM's domain option, Office 365, etc).

The other important part is to get a domain of your own. Put some thought into it since this will be the basis of your e-mail address for years to come. If available, your first and last name is usually a good, professional choice, or even just your last name if you get lucky. Go for something easy to remember and that quickly identifies you. Unless you come up with something very witty or you live in/identify with that country, try to stay away from the country-specific domains (.me, .ly, .tv, and so on) since the "big three" (com, net, org) are more recognizable and less subject to confusion when giving your address to others.

Visit a domain registrar of your choice (NameCheap.com, Gandi.net, GKG.net, etc) and follow the prompts. The common suffixes (properly known as top-level domains) are $8-15/year, depending on registrar. Most registrars offer free DNS services so all you need to do is pay your money at the registrar then sign up at the e-mail hosting provider of your choice. Be CERTAIN you keep paying the annual renewal fee. If you can afford it and really like the name (which you should, if you followed my advice above), register the name for several years. Make sure to keep the e-mail address on the domain registration accurate just in case you lose your password, and treat your login credentials at your registrar similar to your online banking details.

HTH :)

For this exact reason Google Apps is one of my only choices. If Opera would do something similar I'd consider giving their service a try.

good to have one new player (even though it's fastmail), but to me it looks like it's nowhere even close to GMail.

Agreed, I just signed up and it is nothing special at all. It is a shame but with Firefox and Chrome being so good these days I totally forget about Opera. I used to try it out every new major release but I have even stopped doing that now. I don't know why they don't kill the Opera desktop browser as the mobile is the big money maker for them and do some work on WebKit or Gecko. They have a lot of talent but I can't help but feel it is wasted at Opera now.

I love their web browser, except for the bookmarks. If bookmarks were good, I'd use Opera all the time (I tend to use Opera for Facebook and GMail, and Firefox for the rest).

Very pretty. Threaded conversations. Anyone know if there are plans to support domain names?

Looks like it could : http://www.fastmail.fm/help/domain_management.html (opera mail is based on fastmail, they bought this email service, but I'm not sure they offer the same services)

So, I thought this might be a "Thunderbird" in the cloud type service (IE: enter all your IMAP accounts and we'll sync it online).

Bummer that it seems to be just another email provider.

I had hoped that, too; as an avid Opera Mail (M2) user, this would've been awesome. I don't see why a browser vendor needs to run a webmail service so bad (also, it's not new; i had an @operamail.com address 6 years ago)

Awesome.. we really need some Gmail competitors. I love Gmail and all, but they've reigned king with very little real competition for a surprisingly long time.

You still have to give some credit to gmail. Even without the competition new features are rolled out quite often (all the things in the 'labs').

At first glance this looks amazing!

I've long been looking for a service almost as good as Gmail so i can leave and finally have some privacy in my email correspondence.

Thanks Opera!

Could turn out to be a Gmail competitor, but they'll need a better domain for it than myopera.com.

Wish they found some way for users to use opera.com instead.

We don't use 'My' anymore.

Right, these days it's "Hip".

Does anyone know if you can configure POP3 or IMAP?

I couldn't find it.

when you sign up the welcome email gives imap info

I don't see any reason to use them over GMail

No way to customize labels / star emails?

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