General

Thinking Outside The (Windows) Box,
Part 3: Free Mail Clients—Opera Mail

While many businesses depend on Microsoft and its various product suites, alternatives exist, some of which are not well known. Part three of this series examines free e-mail clients.

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [March 2, 2006]

As described in Part 2, we tested Opera 8.0 on Windows XP SP2. Opera is also available for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000, Solaris, QNX, OS/2, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, and mobile operating systems.

Opera Mail www.opera.com Opera Software ASA Oslo, Norway

Unlike other clients described in this article, Opera's browser, mail, and news clients are installed together as one integrated application. If you want Opera mail without the browser, use Hugin to customize the application.

The Opera mail client supports Opera webmail, POP3, IMAP, and SMTP, with an extensive list of TLS/SSL ciphersuites. Authentication options include CRAM-MD5, APOP, login, and plaintext (see figure at left). In "auto" mode, Opera tries the most secure method first, down-grading until the session connects. This is an interesting way to determine the strongest method supported by your mail server, but for safety's sake, we recommend choosing one method and sticking to it.

Like the Opera browser, mailbox access can be controlled by a master "Wand" password. Security settings associated with mail display are also tied to the Opera browser—for example, disabling Java and Javascript. If session encryption is not enough for you, message contents can probably be signed or encrypted with a third-party PGP program like GPGrelay, although we did not attempt this.

The Opera browser is feature-rich, supporting themes, keyboard/mouse gestures, and voice commands. It should come as no surprise that Opera mail shares this bountiful approach. For starters, Opera mail groups everything—messages, attachments, mailing lists, active threads, recently-used contacts, and spam—into overlapping, automatically-generated "views" (see figure at right).

For example, incoming junk mail appears in "Unread" and "Spam" views. If the message happens to contain an X-Mailing-List header, it will also automatically appear in a mailing list view. In short, Opera acts like a self-directed secretary, sorting your correspondence into (virtual) piles that you may or may not find useful. But this does not stop you from organizing things your own way, using labels, searches, and filters.

This plethora of options is powerful but can also be overwhelming. Consider searching messages for keywords. You can use "Quick Find" to search message bodies and headers, narrowing results as each letter is typed. Or you could run a "Sticky Search" that scans existing messages and saves search criteria as a view to be applied to future messages. Both tools are quite handy, but choices create a learning curve.

Filtering is another good example. Opera supports custom and built-in filters. Filters can contain rules, consisting of logical statements and regular expressions pertaining to message attributes. Filters can also observe user behavior to learn which messages belong to that filter. A given filter can use learning, rules, or both. The built-in spam filter combines both methodologies with internal detection rules (see figure at left). We found Opera's spam filter very effective—once we learned to hide spam in all other views.

With everything jammed into Opera, we note one omission: spell check requires separate installation of GNU Aspell and desired dictionaries. Otherwise, the Opera installer contains just about everything but the kitchen sink—in fact, we might argue that Opera even includes tools to build your own kitchen sink, for those inclined to tinker.