Opera Mail – standalone mail client | Hacker News Reader

Opera Mail – standalone mail client

my.opera.com

138 pointsexterm105 comments

Just tested this with https://emailprivacytester.com/ and it failed

Even though it claims to not load remote content by default, and pops up a "Load Images" dialogue, it actually loads content from the html5 video and audio tags immediately.

So whilst this doesn't work unless the user clicks "Load Images":

  <img src="http://TRACKING_URL/">

This does:

  <video autoplay="true" src="http://TRACKING_URL/"></video>

Sounds like a bug, I'd suggest you report it.

Yeah, I'm just about to do that.

[edit] Their bug report form has a bug. https://bugs.opera.com/wizarddesktop/ keeps failing for me. If somebody else can submit this, it would be much appreciated.

It looks like the bugwizard hasn't been updated to make it obvious how to report mail bugs yet, but I have filed your issue.

(and the problem preventing the bugwizard working at all should now be fixed)

When I download the mail it says:

"Thank you for choosing Opera browser. We hope you enjoy it."

Should it be Opera Mail, not browser.

Yes it should :-) I had to do quite a bit of research to find out who maintains that page and could update it. But found them in the end and that papercut is reported. I'll check it again tomorrow to see if it has been fixed :-)

Ouch! Looking at it. Have created a bug about it already, so no need to report.

I like it a lot when someone involved with the project answers to "bug reports" or complaints like this. Gives me the feeling that they care. I see this a lot on hacker news and it always puts a smile on my face.

Works in Opera 12.15 too. Is there a hope for fix in it?

Thanks for this cool tool. FWIW, older versions of Opera with included mail client have the same problem.

I thought it came out that emailprivacytester.com was a service created by the NSA.

It was created by me. The complete source code is available on github if you would prefer to host it yourself. Linked to from the about and privacy pages of the site.

Fair enough, I was just joking of course...

Does it offer PGP integration?

Well-designed email clients with proper privacy seem to be very hard to come by, and new players in that niche would be welcome. Particularly in the current climate, I would argue.

Yeah, what happened there? I had Eudora in the mid-90s running PGP integrated really nicely. I was talking with a friend how had never used PGP before and I realised somehow I just stopped using it and don't remember when. Maybe it was just the romantic ideal back then that we were important enough to have our mail read, or maybe it was that we actually personally knew the ISP admins and really knew they could read our mail.

Exactly! I'd pay to see an easy one-click PGP integration!

Well, just installed and I rather like it. Sleek design. Simple interface. RSS is a good addition. Sadly, though, no auto-feed discovery like many RSS clients do nowadays.

At first glance looks more appealing than Thunderbird. Certainly so in configuration, which is simpler and more intuitive. Thunderbird's single SMTP pane for all accounts annoys me each time I see it.

Lacking vertical positioning for the "List and Message below" layout. But I guess it's just a bug.

They launched it very timely, when the cloud is no more to be trusted. Behold! The return of the desktop app! :)

What does the way you access your data has anything to do with where it is stored? Just because you read your emails from a local copy, don't fool yourself into thinking that the drawbacks of the cloud no longer applies to you.

Now, if you were to host your own mail gateway, that is a different matter entirely.

Using a standalone desktop app allows you to use encryption (PGP/GPG) while continuing to use hosted services like Gmail/Hotmail. In other words, you can again start treating networks as dumb pipes.

They still get access to the "metadata" though

Fake it, then. Fake yor location, fake your mac address, fake your time and timezone. &c.

You can't fake the IP address you connect from. You can't fake the email address you're sending to. You can't fake the account you're using to send. You can't fake the time that you connect.

Then use Tor.

Have a disposable email address.

You don't have to fake the account just make one just for this purpose. Well, time you cannot fake but with just known value of time and many other unknown variables the equation and possible solution would be useless, practically.

Look at all the comments under the announcement. Really sum's up how I feel as well. A selling point of Opera was the built in email client.

I liked how Opera used to be a silo for a whole bunch of features. When you closed it the rest closed as well. Was a great way to turn off work.

Now we have ANOTHER fairly generic stand alone email client. ANOTHER fairly generic webkit browser. If it wasn't branded with an Opera logo would anyone really give a shit?

I, for one, give a shit because I need a standalone email client that fits my workflow better than what we have now (I use Thunderbird nowadays).

The Opera logo is merely just encouraging me to check it out.

You could've had that all this time already by simply installing Opera 12.15 into its own directory and using it only for mail.

> a silo for a whole bunch of features. When you closed it the rest closed as well. Was a great way to turn off work.

Honestly, it sounds like you want an OS running in a virtual machine. Nobody is going to pursue your ideal "monolithic productivity suite that does everything" path; it's just a plain-bad idea.

I currently contract at 2 different companies. I have the machines I was given at both running headless and just bring my laptop in and SSH to them to do work (my workflow is tmux/vim based). I then keep 2 separate user accounts on my laptop to separate the 2 environments. Leaving work is as simple as logging out and going back to my personal account.

Unless of course the monolithic productivity suite is written in elisp. ;-)

> it's just a plain-bad idea.

That's a very nice opinion, but without actually qualifying why you think that way it has nothing to do with reality.

Because an operating system is a good idea, and a monolithic do-everything productivity suite subverts the point of an operating system by creating a very limited, hard-coded, non-extensible OS on top of the OS, reimplementing half of what the OS already does, but poorly, failing to interact with any components not distributed with the suite, and not allowing for any of the things modern OSes allow for (multi-display MDI support, for example, or package management.) There is no justification for having two redundant layers of OS; anything the suite does in terms of integration (for example, a clipboard implementation), could be converted to an OS feature of the parent system and used to integrate anything with anything.

And if you really think the do-everything productivity suite is the one with the right ideas and the OS you're running is the one that's screwed-up--well, then, there's still no reason to run two layers; instead, what should be done is to expand the productivity suite into an OS. Like Chromium OS and Firefox OS are currently in the process of.

And now comes the part where you explain to me how i combine Firefox and Thunderbird into one app such that i can have various emails open in first-class-citizen tabs alongside web pages. Since apparently Firefox does such an amazing job of it.

I thought so too - I've been an Opera user for nearly 12 years. But genuinely, I know think this is for the better - Opera15 is bloody fast compared to Presto. I can see that they are trying. It's still long ways to go, but they have had a decent start.

Same here. I never used the mail part of M2 (other than for testing purposes), but I used love its RSS feed reader and IRC client. I want a browser with a deeply integrated feed reader which makes subscribing to and following content easy. I don't want to have to remember to launch a new website or an app to read the news I want to read.

Looks interesting. I've been a Thunderbird user for a long time but the fact it appears to have been practically abandoned[0] by Mozilla is a shame.

The 'Import from Thunderbird' wizard appears to be a bit broken, though. It tried to import all my Thunderbird accounts but seems to have just munged them all into one account in Opera Mail. It would be nice if I could selectively import single Thunderbird accounts.

Also, as others have mentioned, it seems to be lacking compared to Thunderbird in auto configuration (in TB, I can enter a Google Apps email address and it'll figure out it's Google for me).

[0] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

I am not particularly happy with its integration with Gmail. Each email from facebook group is assigned separate mailing list. So now when I expand mailing list it is just cluttered with rubbish sublists like [0-9]*.groups.facebook... In general part which is responsible for detecting what is actually a mailing list isn't very clever. It would be nice if instead of creating folders for each label on Gmail it would create new label - so that it will be 1-1 integration.

Design seems really neat and if it will provide better Gmail integration I would love to use it. Of course I realise it is not going to be number one front-end for Gmail ported from web to standalone application, but I think that most popular mailboxes deserve it.

Is anyone here using fastmail and can tell how well it integrates in it? Is it more ingelligent and joins labels from fastmail with those in OperaMail or it just works the same way as with Gmail - new folder for each label?

Mailing lists are not the same as labels. Labels and Mailing lists are two different features (albeit very similar).

Mailing list only looks at the List-Id: email header. Facebook is sending that in its emails, and that's why it gets its own "Mailing list" automatic entry.

Not that beautiful, I agree.

As for labels, I meant that both OperaMail and Gmail have system of tags. However Gmail tags are treated as IMAP folders not using OperaMail tags. I realise that creating new tags in OperaMail may get out of sync with Gmail, but the the other way round - having labels from Gmail imported as labels to OperaMail should be possible to do.

Good. But what I want to see, is Opera web browser _without_ an email client (and all the other stuff I never use.) Opera browser badly needs some slimming down.

Call me old fashioned, but I deliberately use a prehistoric email client _precisely_ because it does not know anything about active content. Barely even handles html. And I like it that way.

Now if Opera's email client had a big master switch, to totally disable all features beyond strictly dumb ASCII, and a means to import huge old mail archives from Eudora, then I'd be interested.

Edit: Correction: to disable anything beyond dumb ASCII plus UTF-8 foreign language support. But NOT html or any other active content.

opera browser without e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/developer/next Not for linux yet, though.

Good news. I'm OK with Windows - I'd rather be enraged with Microsoft, than with the Million Monkey syndrome.

I think I could connect the Million Monkey syndrome to the Linux ecosystem, but what does it exactly mean?

I ran a clean installation of Opera 12, and there was no e-mail client. It is actually there, but you won't even notice unless you set up an account. So to anyone who doesn't make an account it's exactly as if there was no email client.

And your comment about slimming down Opera is quite funny considering that Opera 12 with a full mail client is less than half the size of Chrome...

I just tested running the Windows version under Wine on Debian Wheezy and it works.

The main thing I care about with a mail client is the exit strategy - if I don't like it, can I export all my mail losslessly to mbox or eml files?

Does anyone know how it fares at this?

I use gmail now, though in the past I've used The Bat.

If your server has IMAP, you shouldn't need that.

You may also care about a server exit strategy. Your local storage format becomes relevant in the event you want to change email servers. (Maybe if, for example, your email server decides to stop supporting IMAP to get everybody to use the ad-serving web interface instead. Or your email server belongs to a large company suspected of leaking to the NSA.)

Opera stores mails in mbox-like format natively.

Always good to see a new desktop client. Hopefully they'll add Kerberos auth, PGP/MIME and read/write LDAP based address books. Until then I'll stick with Evolution for those features.

The download page is so sleek it doesn't even have a link to documentation so I can see what I'm downloading before wasting my time.

Great news! Thunderbird was horrific on my aging Windows machine last year, so always had Opera open just for email.

Been using this since the release candidate a week or so ago and absolutely loving it. Has a few quirks here and there which need to be configured or ignored, but I've found it the best organising tool for mail on OSX in a long.

I'm kind of disappointed by the first-launch experience: there's no configuration wizards for common email providers, not even for fastmail which is an Opera division AFAIK.

Edit : Actually there is, but it's not very discoverable.

There is, I only entered my fastmail address (not even using the fastmail.fm domain) and it configured automatically.

Yes, we have a shipped XML configuration file which finds and sets up many common domains automatically.

I would totally expect that, given that Opera owns Fastmail.

Loaded up my gmail in it. Then went to attachments, documents. Lots of hits from my gmail spam-folder. This needs work...

edit: the basic mail function looks okay. looking forward to testing the linux version against exchange.

Wow, that sure is an annoying product page. Where are the details about what mail providers they support? Does it do calendering? What are the system requirements (WinXP, OS X 10.5, CentOS 5, etc...)?

Supports IMAP and POP. Mail providers like gmail, yahoo and hotmail should work pretty well. Doesn't do calendaring. Runs on WinXP. Don't know about that old OS X version, but I think it probably does. Runs on old Linux (when we release the Linux version that is). You don't even need gtk or qt, though it'll use them if it can find them.

Is there an ETA for the linux version ? Or a beta ?

edit: ah I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860776 , around a month then.

Excellent! Now put that information on the web page somewhere so that others don't have to wonder. It doesn't even have to be on the home page, just somewhere. :)

As a downside, I see that it doesn't support Exchange and that pretty much dooms it for me, at least on OS X. I hate Exchange, but I have to deal with it. Luckily, Apple's Mail.app seems to work fairly well with Exchange so at least I'm not forced to use Outlook.

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

They definitely need a better landing page to really 'sell' this thing. Should do a contest of one for them.

What do you mean by "what mail providers they support"? Opera supports POP and IMAP. That basically means any email provider out there.

Installed it but didn't use it. I don't want to go through the hassle of looking for the configuration info of my GMail (one of the most popular email services) account. So 2003.

it should guess the details correctly after you entered your address.

Looks interesting, definitely will give it a go.

Can anyone suggest other mail clients worth trying out? I'm tired of Mail.app these days.

I never understood tabs in an email client

I use it to put important mails such as tasklists on separate tabs so that I can come back to them easily and keep reading other emails.

Is there a way to connect it to the OSX Address Book or Gmail contacts? Doesn't look like it?

Looks great, I just need to wait for the Linux version before I give it a go :)

When is Mozilla going to make a Thunderbird addon for Firefox?

An important feature for email: fast and flexible search over a large dataset. This is easier to implement in the cloud than on the client. So I don't see a strong future for desktop-based email clients.

It will never die on my PC.

Funny you mention it. Search in opera mail is excellent and extremely fast. It searches through all of my 12k mails in the blink of an eye.

And small bonus is that search works even when user is offline... if you are US government :-)

It is also a RSS reader. I don't really get it.

Can't you also read RSS using the OSX Mail.app?

Or any other mail client really. What I don't get is why they stripped it out from the browser (I didn't take up any disk space really).

edit: I really hope they don't take out RSS reader functionality out as well. I never got why other browser didn't support such basics when it came to browsing.

They are building a completely new browser based on chromium. So they didn't really strip it out, they just didn't add it to the new browser.

Switching to Chromium was a big mistake IMO, seeing how inferior, unstable, and slow the new Android app is compared to the original. I get it, they had to cut costs, so they fired a bunch of people and gave up their proprietary edge. It just seems to have been the wrong decision because they took away one of the core features that used to make it great (at least with regards to the Android app): speed.

From what I've read the desktop version lost basically everything that was special to Opera. I know it's early builds but I think many features won't make it back.

Opera Mail (previously M2) is probably still using the Presto engine (and the old interface) as they seem to have just extracted it from previous releases. Thus it is incompatible with their new version and Chromium.

RSS reader in Mail.app is removed in OS X Mountain Lion

What's the point?

Windows only?!?

I expect Linux and Mac versions to follow. They have released windows version first on new products in the past.

I work on Linux version of Opera Mail. Windows and Mac is released today. A rc/test version of Linux will follow soon.

(What is soon, you ask. Well that depends, but I guess in this case over a month would /not/ be soon.)

Thanks for replying here. I couldn't find other links to the Mac version so I inferred that there was only Windows support. It would be nice to have "Linux coming soon" page instead of "Download for Windows" by default :)

Mac only?!?

It sniffs your platform :)

I'm on Ubuntu and with Firefox and Chromium I get offered the windows download. It doesn't sniff very well :)

Linux support is coming

I get a download link on a Mac. Can't see the Windows or Linux link, presumably only shows the Download link for your OS.

http://www.opera.com/download/get/?partner=www&opsys=MacOS&p...

So, how secure do we know this is?

No Linux support boo!

I see no mention is made of their secret access portal to NSA...

lol? This comment is a little confusing considering Opera is based on Norway. And as far as I know Opera is probably one of the better ones in regards to NSA said stuff.

I'd like to hear the full story on how Opera self-destructed as a company. Someone should write a book or something.

Considering this is an announcement for a new software release, the comments were already negative enough. However, yours is just plain rude. Opera has not self-destructed as anything, and in fact they take the steps they think necessary but others would likely find intimidating (such as throwing out a rendering engine or releasing a standalone client, which they probably knew will be controversial).

Why do you think Opera self-destructed? They announced their quarterly financial results a couple of weeks ago, and they set another revenue and profit record. They're basically growing on all fronts, have plenty of cash in the bank, and are growing their profits.

So again, what self-destruction are you referring to?

They just announced that Opera 12 will be discontinued, with Opera 15 being a Chrome fork in which they will attempt to reimplement features from Opera 12. They also announced that several features which people liked a lot will never make it into Opera 15. And to put the cherry on the top: The very first feature that they announced removed were "Bookmarks".

In other words: They're very busy alienating massive parts of their user base.

You don't seem to understand what's going on.

Most Opera users are on mobile, not desktop. Opera is struggling on desktop. Sites weren't working, and that was the #1 problem with the browser. Fixing that will let them grow. Opera's got nothing to lose on the desktop. They can only gain users by doing this, even if a handful of hardcore users drop them.

Most people don't need most features in Opera 12, but they're just getting started with the new Opera. Now they can create a proper foundation instead of this:

http://www.favbrowser.com/opera-the-past-the-present-the-fut...

Opera 15 is not a fork of Chrome either. It's using Chrome (Chromium) as-is, but with a new user interface on top of it.

In other words: They may alienate a small hardcore group, but fixing site compatibility will more than make up for it because other people can finally start using it.

Check their financial reports, desktop is 25% of their income: http://business.opera.com/company/investors/finance/

> Opera 15 is not a fork of Chrome either.

Are you thenwhat? Just on the off-chance that you're not him: What you described is exactly what a fork is. Please don't try to comment on software development until you've actually gained the experience that job entails.

Desktop is a smaller and smaller part of their income. It could disappear tomorrow, and the company would still be in great shape. It's growing all over the place. So again, claiming that Opera self-destructed is silly.

Thenwhat? Huh? A fork is taking the code in a new direction and making it differ from the original. Using the code as-is, is not a fork.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com