{"id":2286,"date":"2009-04-19T09:41:21","date_gmt":"2009-04-19T14:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=2286"},"modified":"2009-04-19T09:41:21","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T14:41:21","slug":"on-working-with-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=2286","title":{"rendered":"On Working With Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been experimenting with Opera<\/a> for the past month.<\/p>\n

The world, at least the Windows world, is divided into Internet Explorer and Firefox users. With a contingent of Google Chrome users and Safari users. I’ve never used Chrome — Google’s EULA was creepy as hell — and while I’ve given Apple’s Safari a try, I haven’t really liked it.<\/p>\n

I’m different. I use Opera.<\/p>\n

I started using it in college. I remember downloading Opera 3 and playing around with that. I didn’t like it. Around Opera 5 I started using it more. Around the time of Opera 7 it became, if not my primary browser, my more-often-than-not browser. With Opera 8 it finally<\/i> became my primary browser.<\/p>\n

Now I’m running the Opera 10 Alpha. It’s fast. It’s lightweight. It has everything I need in a single package that’s a small download (about 5 megabytes).<\/p>\n

Opera is, I’ve decided, the George Harrison of browsers.<\/p>\n

If IE and Firefox are the John and Paul of browsers (or Paul and John, depending on how you view them), Opera is the quiet browser in the background that just flies<\/i> like a virtuoso guitar player, like George Harrison. It’s like a spiritual experience, in a way, using Opera. Much like listening to George Harrison.<\/p>\n

Basically, Opera is the browser for me. And how can it not<\/i> be my browser, when its Javascript engine is codenamed “Futhark,” and as everyone knows, if I were an ancient language, I would be Futhark<\/a>. \ud83d\ude06 What can I say? I do love my runes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One feature of Opera that I have never really used has been its e-mail client, M2 or, as its going by now, Opera Mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the past month, it’s what I’ve been using (almost) exclusively for my e-mail needs.<\/p>\n

I’ve used the Opera Mail interface for about three years now; it’s the same interface Opera uses for its RSS feed reader. It’s also the Usenet client, and I’ve used Opera for that as well. (Yes, I do occasionally use Usenet in this day and age.)<\/p>\n

But for e-mail? No.<\/p>\n

In the Opera 10 Alpha, the developers added HTML functionality to e-mail. Previously, Opera’s e-mail client had been limited to composing in plain text. It could display<\/i> HTML-formatted e-mails though the browser’s rendering engine, but it couldn’t reply to an HTML e-mail in HTML format.<\/p>\n

I should note that HTML was not<\/i> a make-or-break design decision for me. I rarely compose rich text e-mails. If you write to me in rich text, I’ll reply to you in rich text. If you write me in plain text, I’ll reply to you in plain text.<\/p>\n

Instead, it was the fact that I’m using an Alpha<\/i> version. We’re talking pre-Beta here, people. We’re talking bleeding edge code here, people. An Alpha! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

God, I sound like such a nerd. I’m not even a tech head.<\/p>\n

I wanted to get the full experience out of the Alpha. And I realized that I’d never ever given Opera Mail a fair shake.<\/p>\n

So I spent about half an hour configuring the e-mail client in Opera about a month ago. I worked out how to leave my e-mail messages on my server; I wanted to be able to also download them into The Bat<\/a>, the e-mail client I’ve used since 2000, for back-up since I didn’t want to lose them if the Opera Alpha went unstable. I figured out how to delete e-mail messages in Opera and have them deleted on my server.<\/p>\n

And then I started to play. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Opera Mail does some interesting things with e-mail.<\/p>\n

I can designate someone a “Followed Contact” and I get a special folder where all my e-mail messages to and from that person are sorted. The one kicker is that if a person has multiple e-mail addresses that they use, I have to do multiple “Follow Contact” designations, one for each e-mail address. But one cool thing is that I can assign icons to my Followed Contacts; for instance, one person is a red petunia. Other icons are little headshots from Opera’s icon library that vaguely resemble the person in real life. Or they’re just generic, non-descript stylized heads and shoulders. Or in the case of Keith DeCandido, it’s the Frankenstein Monster, because there’s not a single icon I can choose from that resembles Keith at all<\/i>.<\/p>\n

E-mails from mailing lists are automatically sorted into folders. At least, they’re supposed<\/i> to be. One list I subscribe to, HASTRO-L<\/a> (devoted to discussion about the history of astronomy), doesn’t sort, and I’ve found no way to convince Opera that messages from HASTRO-L are from a mailing list to put them with my other mailing lists. But for that, I’ve created an actual filter.<\/p>\n

Yes, Opera does filtering as well. A writing market newsletter gets filtered into its own folder. Comic invoices get filtered into their folder.<\/p>\n

Then, I can assign labels to received e-mails. If it’s an important message, I can mark it as Important, and the message shows up in a special folder called “Important.”<\/p>\n

Here’s what’s interesting about the way Opera Mail works.<\/p>\n

All of these folders? They’re virtual<\/i> folders. No message is actually moved<\/i> anywhere. It’s how you use<\/i> the e-mail that determines where Opera shows it to you.<\/p>\n

What this means is that I’ve altered the way I deal with my e-mail.<\/p>\n

When the e-mail is downloaded, Opera tells me which folders have messages. Now, there’s a folder called “Unread” that has every unread message, and there’s a folder called “Received” that has every single message, read and unread, that I’ve received. But I don’t start with those.<\/p>\n

I start with my Followed Contacts. These are friends, and if they have e-mailed me, I look in the folders there first. I reply to them as necessary, I mark them as read, and then I move on to the mailing lists. I clean those out, deleting most of the messages. Once I’ve done both the Followed Contacts and the Mailing Lists — that’s the bulk of my daily e-mail — I look in the Unread folder to see what’s left. I delete the deleted messages off my mail server, then I’ll use The Bat to pull the remaining messages off the server to archive them.<\/p>\n

Opera Mail is not<\/i> perfect right now. It occasionally locks up the browser while I’m composing an e-mail reply. I’ve had some difficulty attaching files to e-mails.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, I’m happy with it. I don’t know why I didn’t give it a fair shake earlier, in all the years that I’ve been using Opera.<\/p>\n

Opera Mail isn’t a reason for anyone to give up their other e-mail clients if they’re happy with their browser. But if you are using Opera and you’re not using Opera Mail, give it a try and use it for a month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been experimenting with Opera for the past month. The world, at least the Windows world, is divided into Internet Explorer and Firefox users. With a contingent of Google Chrome users and Safari users. I’ve never used Chrome — Google’s EULA was creepy as hell — and while I’ve given Apple’s Safari a try, IContinue reading “On Working With Opera”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[441,374],"class_list":["post-2286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-e-mail","tag-opera","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}