Opera Mail client interview: Submit your questions
74 CommentsPublished May 8th, 2007 6:57 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman
Opera is currently working on a major upgrade to the Opera Mail client (M2). I asked Arjan van Leeuwen, the lead developer of the Opera Mail client, to answer any questions you may have.
So here we go. Post your Opera-mail related questions for Arjan in the comments section to this post. In about a week I’ll send Arjan a list of your top questions; and I’ll post his answers here on Opera Watch.
Important: This is an interview, not a wishlist for the mail client — so please post your questions. 
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I would like to know will Opera Mail client be able to view external images in HTML formatted mails.
Since now some newsletters have images loaded from external resources and those images are not shown in M2. That is good for security but it would be even more better to have an option to allow viewing of those images for some e-mail addresses one could personally allow, just like Opera already has Site Preferences you can control per site for web browsing.
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Hello, Daniel and Arjan (I’m Dutch, too…)
Question: will the fully upgraded M2 make it easier to use multiple addresses? It’s a bit of a hassle now. You bring up the contacts list, click on a name, the email address appears, and then you have to start all over again: contacts list, click, contacts list, click…, for every separate address. Opera can do better than that!
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Why has M2 been allowed to languish so long? What assurances do we have as users have that after this upcoming upgrade it will be a given ongoing resources and continued to be actively developed?
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Why do comments have to be moderated? What criteria is used in their moderation?
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Will we see a new M2 GUI in Kestrel or Peregrine? Will it be called M3?
Will it try to compete with more visually pleasing mail services like Gmail? Will it have conversation grouping similar to Gmail?
Will Opera Mini have any updates as far as Opera Mail goes?
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Will M2 ever be released as a standalone client?
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sorry, i’m spaniard.
1º – Will be separated the RSS feeds of the M2? I want it
2º – Will have best support of webmail (like gmail) in M2? Thinking about get contacts, my favorite wish about it.
Thanks for the time and for the good job in M2!
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bill, comments with certain keywords that are usually found in comment spam are held for moderation.
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Outlook 2003 and Thunderbird 2 have a great way to notify users of new e-mails through so called Desktop Alerts, small popups that appear in the right bottom corner of the screen and show the first line(s) of a new message. Opera Mail’s mail notification seems somewhat obsoleted, at best. How will this develop?
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Will the delays and freezes with mail be dealt with?
Any way to archive/store old mail?
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How about allowing live contact synchronization and/or web calendar integration? I’d love to use Opera Mail instead of Outlook, but use two major features in Outlook:
1) Intergated PIM. Meaning, I use my contacts list with email, and I use email to schedule calendar appointments with those same contacts.
2) Sync with PalmOS treo. I would love to sync my Treo with Opera’s contact list. And if I could find a calendar app that sync’d and integrated with Opera Mail, I’d be all set.
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I would like to use some markups in M2 – I always envied friends sending me such mails.
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opera mail wishlist:
-adding more than one recipient for an email – how about a simple scroll box instead windows start menu-styled
-more powerful contacts – printing, etc.
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@Joonas Lehtolahti:
it’s already there,
toggle “view external images” = toggle “block external elements”
@Heathen Dan:
“Will M2 ever be released as a standalone client?”
this is already possible using a normal Opera installation with a customized setup
- separate installation:
just make a separate installation, if you have problems with the normal installer use the classic installer and update this with msi afterwards if you need a localized version
- Hugin setup by Rijk:
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/12/18/9-10-is-final-and-so-is-hugin-2-5
don’t miss the hints given there to make it more useful
some more of Rijk’s setups:
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2007/04/17/updated-setups-for-9-2
@cels:
you can have separated RSS feeds by disabling View – Show – “Show newsfeeds” for all views you don’t want to see the feeds
For the feeds you can either use the Newsfeeds view (you will only see the elements from one feed source at one time) or have a separate view for all feed messages with a filter and add the rule:
Any header – Contains – @rss.opera.com
@Daniel:
nearly all of my comments are held for moderation (more than 9 out of 10), also the very short ones
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Thunderbird 2.0 tagging | Gmail labeling
The ability to write user scripts for mail actions. For example, I normally use TheBat, and “Park” messages that I want to save. Parking means the message can not be moved/deleted, and it stays in its folder. (I use folders because I follow lots of mailing lists). One of the nice features about parking is I can delete all the messages I don’t want to save in a folder, and my parked messages won’t be deleted.
I can sort of accomplish that with tagging but not quite.
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@Gail:
it’s written somewhere that in internal builds the freezes are already gone and that this is a very important point for development
@Keith:
to select multiple recipients you can use in the contacts panel Right click – Compose for a folder which will add all recipients of this folder to a new email. Or you can just highlight multiple contacts and choose Compose on right click. To highlight contacts from multiple folders you need View – Full view
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Some more filtering/scripting rules would be nice.
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Cool. Answers for questions…
Will there be any improvements to handling of blocked images? I would love to be able to tell Opera to block all images (maybe just all images in certain views, such as ’spam’), and then have a nifty button that I can click to show images in a specific e-mail.
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ResearchWizard, first off, thanks for your help in answering some of the questions here.
With regards to the comment moderation, I hold comments for moderation containing keywords that are commonly found in comment spam. One of the keywords that is common in comment spam is the word “nice”. I get a ton of of comments with the words “Nice site”, and linking to their site in the username.
I’m thinking of creating a Wordpress plugin that turns of keyword moderation for comments that are posted within X days of the post publish date. Spammer usually target posts that are more than a week old, so this would help a bit.
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M2=Mail client, 2nd generation, I guessed years ago. Now let’s hope 3rd generation, then we need several ‘must’ features, like
-delete mails/feed/news-post after some days/weeks, or retain forever setting
-no more .mbs month by month
-stay at the same mail, after changing tree/flat view
-usable search for 2 bytes languages use
-don’t eat too much cpu power while browsing
-crash proof. opera’s crash while receiving/indexing mails causes damages
Oh, I think I’ve written a wishlist.
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my wishes for M2:
IMHO important features:
– (basic) HTML composing (Jon announced this will come)
– save as HTML and TXT besides MBX
– easier groups for contacts (without duplicate contacts like with folders)
– better handling of old or invalid email-addresses – you need the invalid email-contacts if you want to use the view access point but you don’t want to see it in autocomplete of the email address etc
– better handling of multiple email-addresses for the same person
– delete attachments
IMHO nice to have:
– improved blocked external elements: General rule always block, Show external elements with one click for the currently viewed email only (maybe only for the time viewed), and even better would be to specify don’t block for this recipient
– advanced search for more than one word, maybe using regular expressions (and store this search or easy convert it to a filter)
– aliases (nicknames, shortcuts) for email contacts and maybe even contact folders / groups (would be also a less visual replacement for groups) – there should be an autocomplete for this when typing the email (visible before sending)
– special sounds / notification and visualisation depending on rules (esp. sender’s email, could be bound to filters)
– custom images for contacts (outside skin.zip)
– more flexible arrangement of the mail panel – for example I would like to have following order for my first view points: Unread, All mail (received and sent), Filter1, Sent, Outbox, Spam, Filter2
– drag and drop of Filter view points to organize in subfolders / parent folders
– archiving of email or have two or more different storage folders that could be accessed from Opera (if you run out of hard disk space it would be nice to put a whole bunch of emails to a different storage, nevertheless it would be great to view them within the same email client if needed) – this may enable to have a simple group work functionality (accessing the emails from different clients)
– specify separate default From email address for separate contacts
– replace current labels by something more powerful and flexible (automatic rules, custom labels) – could be done by filters
– better match of the contact property fields with other contacts (Outlook , Evolution, Thunderbird, Gmail etc) and easier import / export to different formats (maybe with custom XML fields)
– be more robust with problems of the underlying file system
IMHO needed bug fixes:
– freezes when checking email (I read this is forthcoming)
– database corruption, especially same email in Sent and Drafts (probably forthcoming too with new backend)
– search doesn’t find existing text even with copy from mail & paste in quickfind (I haven’t checked whether this is already fixed during the last months)
– (nice to have) AVM Fritz!BoxFon router notification emails are shown three parted – first text, then HTML (text with images ) and then images instead of just the HTML version. I always have to scroll all the way down which is not easy with “never-ending” (very long) scroll bar (I probably should write a bug report about this, but I’m not sure whether it’s AVM’s fault – it’s properly displayed in Gmail’s web interface).
Well, there is much more, maybe I’ll write about some of it later
Nonetheless I think M2 is already now a very effective way to handle my email (excellent if the bugs are fixed). Just think of the automatic saving of every letter you type (no need to press a button or specify some Save every x minutes freezes) and the great philosophy which is used (copied) by Gmail in a very similar way.
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I don’t want this post to turn into a wish list for the Mail client.
“This is an interview”
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I’d like to see M2 removed from opera (along with the bittorrent client)
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M2 has pioneered the approach of a database like mail client, e.g. using filters instead of folders. While this might appeal to advanced users, it seems often confusing to less demanding users, which probably are in the majority. Do you think, in hindsight, the approach of M2 was the right one? And will it remain the same for its successor?
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How would you rate Opera’s current IMAP implementation in comparison to those of your main competitors? I especially mean Thunderbird, which seems industry leader when it comes to IMAP protocol support. What kind of rework are you planning when it comes to IMAP?
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@Rachid Finge: do you think Gmail is for advanced users only? I think it is vice versa, only people that are used to the folder based approach will probably prefer it.
@Daniel: I’m sorry for my wish list – I totally missed the point of your post. Nonetheless I’m really interested which parts of my list may (or will) be reality in a future Opera Mx.
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Since you have mentioned that this is not a wish list but questions for interview, here are my queries:
1. Will opera ever consider delivering M2 as standalone client? Either as separate download or as an option during installation?
2. Does opera has any plan for including calendar feature in M2 ?
3. Does opera think M2 is at all comparable to Outlook in terms of features for some official person to switch to meet everyday needs?
4. Will M2 support html formatting ?
5. What opera think about the interface of M2? Do they consider it userfriendly when they have different meaning of the term “filters” than any other cient for example? What is the plan to make switching to M2 more user friendly?
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I wish M2 IMAP would work. I.e., _all_ existing messages on the server should also exist on M2 and _all_ messages that have been deleted on the server should be deleted in M2. These are the most basic requirements I can think of, and currently M2 fails both.
Oh, and would be nice if M2 wouldn’t hang almost immediately after starting it. (Requiring you to restart opera and then get “unprocessed imap blah blah” that never work anyway.) It would be even nicer if it would never hang.
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4. Will M2 support html formatting ?
I sure hopeful that it won’t be happen. Virus, spam and etc are mostly from HTML support. I created a filter to block HTML email and the 80% of spam has gone down quickly.
Anyway, I would like to know what exactly kind of new database that M2 is going to have? Explain in technology (for geek/programmer folks
) would be great too.
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What is your biggest pet peeve about the email client ? Mine is reading without a mouse: why is it soo hard, and are you planning to do something about it ?
I use: Feeds > Read feeds.. and then press G (mark as read, go to next) until something interesting comes up. Then, assuming the focus is on the newsitem (press I if not), you can scroll, but it’s such a pain to follow links (A, S don’t work; SHIFT+arrows up/down does!). On going back to read item I skipped (U/J for up/down) there is no focus on the page, and a TAB is in order…
The same happens for emails, with a TAB sometimes needed when the email content doesn’t automatically get focus.
Please take a page from Google Reader’s book, and make reading usable.
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/me mubles something about sending the draft, by mistake
More on the Mail client, reading sent items from the keyboard is practically 90s. ALT M ENTER. And then ? Do I have to use the panel (ctrl alt m) ? Tab, tab, tab, arrows, enter ?
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Is M2 used internally by employees at Opera?
Will Digitial Signatures or Email Encryption be available in the next generation of Opera’s mail client?
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1. Will M2 become more resource hungry with the upgrade?
2. Any folders for feeds?
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After the changes made to the storage system in Opera 9, every message has its own .mbs file and the directory tree generated is Account/Year/Month/Day/. When all messages from a directory are deleted the directory is not purged by M2, the user has to manually remove the whole directory tree (it was reported as a bug back in the beta days). This is a pain and a serious issue when backing messages up, not to mention the disk fragmentation problem generated (more visible under Windows).
Will the new backend fix the problem?.
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Why cant the user decide that his/her signature is under his/her reply, or under the whole message? Now it is the second option, but it looks strange.
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What about fixing long waiting bug about impossibility to change encoding in mail.
The bug is more then year!
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When it will be finished?
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Will the new M2 support advanced search like gmail. Something like: “from:friend AND (subject:important OR body:important) AND (NOT has:attachment)” ?
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feeds:
- manual “update all” option
- folders
keep up the good work
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I would be interested in knowing if Opera is considering offering a calendar for M2 and if there are plans to implement a more functional interaction between M2 and the mail server. Thunderbird has a feature that allows the user to leave the messages on the server until they are deleted from the mail client. This would be very handy to have in M2.
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Would it be possible for the M2 sub-project of Opera, unlike all others, to allow users to vote on the priority of new features being developed?
Or at least to have published a detailed roadmap?
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I like the M2, use everyday with 3 accounts and love it! Thanks for such wonderful application
My only wish is to apply tags to messages, as the labesls, but more than one.
Thanks again for this excellent application!
suribe
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here’s my longish question:
What does Opera want M2 to be? A full email client (within the browser) that can compete with solutions intended for business use or a client for the casual user?
Addendum/ Background: Currently I don’t see the direction M2’s development is headed. For a business solution it’s contact management is subpar and a calender is non existent. A solution for the casual user wouldn’t IMHO need to be as sophisticated.
That said I sincerely hope that we get real updates and of course fixes for those old indexing and other bugs.
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second question:
We already know that M2 will receive lots of attention for the next two versions (most likely 9.5 and 10). Can you assure us that M2 will now get constant developer focus at least as far as bugs are concerned?
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HTML mail composer is a must-have.
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1. What improvements will the new IMAP backend bring in Kestrel and Peregrine? Will the IMAP standards support be similar complete as in clients like Mulberry?
2. Will it be possible to handle multiple personalities of one email account (1 account with multiple email addresses)?
3. Will there be improvements to the managing of newsfeeds (like subfolders, grouping or similar)? Managing many (>100) feeds is rather awkward in a large list without folders/sublists/filters…a stand-alone newsfeed panel for people that don’t use mail in Opera would be worth thinking of, too.
4. Will there be improvements and bugfixes to the filter feature of M2?
5. In what direction is Opera heading with the development of M2? (e.g. full-fledged client with complete IMAP support or simple mail client with many advanced features missing)
6. Will there be any mind-blowing new and advanced features we small Opera enthusiasts or your competitors can’t even think of?
And many many more questions…
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Will the new M2 contain a calender? Like Kmail or Evolution? Will the new mail client be named M3^_^
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If i hava a lot of e-mail(more 100,and RSS), than the opera started not so fast…Can you make with this?
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What are main goals (not features) for upcoming new version of the mail client?
Will news feeds client still stay as part of mail client? (personally, I like this approach)
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Just a small, but important to me, wish in addition
I would like to have ability to move some e-mails to Sent folder via filter (need for Gmail).
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Arjan: When will bug #264030 be fixed?? :-p
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I would like to echo graste’s second question:
I also agree with Joe on the dangers of HTML mail:
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@Daniel: Your blogging software seems to have butchered my nested blockquotes.
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James Cassell, the blockquotes look okay to me. How’s was it supposed to look?
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When using Opera as a browser, I have a lot of GUI elements that I can use independently – i.e., I can open them whenever I wish: the main window, the panels, site preferences, several toolbars etc. However, in M2 you actually need everything in one place: the list of messages, the active message body, the mail panel, the mail toolbar, the list contacts and a Compose window. IMO it doesn’t make sense to open the messages list without the mail panel, nor does it make sense to Compose a message without the Contacts panel.
Does the M2 development team feel this “conflict” between the browser GUI and the mail client GUI and what is their philosophy regarding the GUI of M2?
In practive for me this means that the mail panel is enabled by default and that I shortly switch to another panel whenever I need it. I think I would like Opera to “turn into” a mail client when I start reading or writing a message, and “turn into” a pure browser when I browse the web. I love the fact that Opera is an internet suite, but I wonder if others (especially the dev. team) experience the same as I do.
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The last part of my post was a quote from Joe further up. His post had had a quote in it, which I turned into a blockquote within my quoting him:
<blockquote><blockquote>quote from Operafan2006</blockquote>quote from Joe</blockquote>
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The nested blockquotes should have looked as shown in this image
Anyway, it’s not important, I suppose. I did check, and there is nothing prohibiting blockquotes from being nested. It seems other people have had similar problems with Wordpress
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Hi, why we’re not able to request delivery/read donfirmations using Opera Mail, like on Outlook ? is a tek problem or patented Microsoft tecnology or what?
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sorry, no “donfirmations” on my last comment, the word is confirmations. Sorry for using a new post to correct it but I wasn’t able to edit the last one after posted
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What future does Opera envisage for M2? Will it continue to be small add-on to the browser, or will it evolve? If evolve, in what direction? (mail+calendar? powerful rss aggregator? feature-complete usenet client?)
Are there any plans to utilize upcoming OS X Leopard’s features for Mail? (e-mails flagged as to-dos, shared system-wide)
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Will there be tighter integration of the Opera Webmail service (which needs a huge overhaul!!) with opera’s mail client to give users a great package of mail client AND mail service?
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Ability to choose MBOX instead of MAILDIR storage please!
MAILDIR is very heavy on the filesystem (so power users should use MBOX) and in any case power users also know how to avoid problems with antivirus systems deleting mailfiles.
Calendaring would be cool even if its only connecting to a calendar webservice.
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What about filterls applayed to RSS feeds, like as to emails(virtual folders)
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And what about **full** compatability with outloook, eudora, thunderbird???
I mean **without** waiting ages for it to **convert** the whole mail format so it can be seen!!!!!
- auto-view of graphic attachments..
- Folder view – note that while Eudora looks like it uses folders, they are in fact just text files… (the same way opera has ‘folder view’ for bookmarks and notes, but they are just text files….)
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Will there be support for ispell spellchecking in M2? That would make useable spellchecking possible in many smaller languages like Finnish (Voikko) or Hungarian (Hunspell) (+ Turkish, Estonian etc?)
Are you aware, that such a problem exists? Aspell is useless in many languages.
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Will the age old problem of restricting how many newsgroup messages get downloaded, be fixes?
The mail lockups everyone has been suffering with? Will these be sorted?
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Haha, as if that were possible!
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well, he did say “Post your Opera-mail related questions for Arjan in the comments section to this post” ..
- If it was perfect, we wouldnt be talking and wishing about it…
and BILL… without moderation, it would descend to the low level of juvenile insults and bickering of some other forums…
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Will any new version have a ‘good’ tutorial? A lot of the questions/comments on here seem to have been already dealt with, viz the answers given…..
Bye, Barry
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Opera and M2 are normally touted as secure, but M2 doesn’t have support for S/MIME or PGP/GPG. Is M2 going to get any of these per-message security features?
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So here my real question for the interview:
Opera is always talked about as a browser and every non browser feature is just reported as a nice-to-have add-on. But at least M2 is much more than just another email client with it’s outstanding and superior features (and some severe limitations for average users like HTML composing). Even on Opera’s feature page M2 is hardly mentioned in the lower half of the page.
Will there be enforced marketing for Opera as an email client or even as an Opera suite (thinking of calendar) in near future?
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We were promised with answers to submitted questions within a week. Am I missed something, or the answers are still pending?
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dryu, I still didn’t get back the answers from Arjan. I just spoke with him last week; he said that he’s working on it.