Opera Mail is different from most other e-mail clients. It organizes your messages for you, and it has an indexing engine which allows for lightning-fast searches, making it easy to retrieve old messages. When you get used to working with Opera Mail, you will ideally find yourself with more time to read and reply to your messages, because you spend less of your time organizing them.

Setting Up an Account and Importing Messages

To begin, you will need to set up a new account or import account settings from another application. Go to Tools > Mail and chat accounts. If you have not yet created any accounts, you will be prompted to create an account now. If you have already created an account, click the Add button. Select which kind of account. Ask your ISP for the specific server names or IP addresses to enter into the incoming and outgoing mail servers. If your ISP uses a non-standard server port (default ports are 143 for IMAP, 110 for POP, and 119 for NNTP), you can enter it after the server name in the form "servername:port", i.e. "pop.example.com:111". you would like to create.

The "Leave messages on server" setting is enabled by default for POP users. This setting tells Opera Mail to leave all received e-mail on the mail server, so it's accessible from other computers. Most POP(Post office protocol) users will want this setting disabled if they'll only be accessing their e-mail via Opera Mail.

Once you have created an e-mail or newsgroup account, the Mail menu and Mail panel should appear. You can use these to access your accounts.

Useful Account Settings

From the Tools > Mail and chat accounts dialog, you can create, delete, and edit your mail and news accounts. To edit account details, select an account and click "Edit". Important account settings are described below.

Account category

On the "General" tab, you can add a custom account category to be used with the account selector. Type a new category name or choose an existing category from the drop-down. You can then restrict visible messages to specific categories using the context menu in the Mail panel or from Mail > Show account.

Security password

You can set a security password to control access to your mailboxes. Go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Security, set a master password with at least one numeric and one alphabetic character. Tick "Use as master password for e-mail and Wand". You can set the frequency of a system password prompt using the "Ask for password" setting.

Important: Be sure to remember your master password, because you cannot retrieve it.

Opera Web Mail Premium

Users of the fee-based Opera Web Mail Premium service can access their Opera Web Mail account using POP. Opera Mail will automatically fill out much of your account information when you choose to setup an Opera Web Mail account. Your "Login name" should appear as follows: "username:operamail.com#operamail.com", where "username" is your Opera Web Mail account ID. For your reference, the incoming server is "pop3.operamail.com" and the outgoing server is "smtpx.operamail.com".

Message import

It is possible to import e-mail from earlier versions (before 7.x) of Opera, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Mail (only version 6 and 7, and related email clients such as the Mozilla suite), Thunderbird, or any mailbox stored in the generic mbox format (usually *.mbx or *.mbs files), including older versions of Netscape. You can import different accounts settings, folders, and contacts. Your imported account's folder structure will be displayed under "Filters", and the imported messages will be available in "Received". Filters cannot be imported.

Select File > Import and export > Import mail to import. If your previous mailer is not listed above, see if it includes the capability to export to the mbox format.

bx or *.mbs files), including older versions of Netscape. You can import different accounts settings, folders, and contacts. Your imported account's folder structure will be displayed under "Filters", and the imported messages will be available in "Received". Filters cannot be imported.

Select File > Import and export > Import mail to import. If your previous mailer is not listed above, see if it includes the capability to export to the mbox format.