Opera Mail 2000 – 2013
Opera was one of the very few browsers with a real e-mail client inside. From Opera 4 to Opera 12, the browser could read your mail, newsgroups and news feeds, and from Opera 7 it organized everything without a single folder.
A mail client in the browser
Opera 2.00, in 1996, could already send mail and read Usenet newsgroups. Opera 4.00, in June 2000, added a complete e-mail client. Opera 7.00, in January 2003, replaced it with a new one, called M2 by its developers, which remained part of the browser until Opera 12.
No folders, only views
Instead of moving messages into folders, M2 stored every message once in a database and showed it in as many views as needed: by contact, by mailing list, by filter or by label. A message from a friend about a holiday could appear under the friend's name, under a "Travel" filter and under a red label at the same time.
Search was instant across everything you had ever received, and a low-bandwidth mode, added in Opera 9.60, downloaded only the headers on slow connections.
Opera Mail on opera.com, September 2009.
Mail, news, feeds and chat
The same client read Usenet newsgroups and, from Opera 7.50 in May 2004, RSS feeds; that version also added an IRC chat client and full-text search of mail. Opera 8.00 added Atom feeds, Opera 9.60 the ability to follow or ignore threads and contacts, and Opera 10.00 HTML mail composition. Opera 11.60, in December 2011, gave Opera Mail a new layout.
Labels.
Filters.
Instant search.
Low-bandwidth mode.
The feed reader in Opera 11.60.
The mail layout in Opera 11.
Opera Mail 1.0, on its own
The Chromium-based Opera 15, released on July 2, 2013, had no mail client. Three weeks earlier, on June 11, Opera had released the mail client of Opera 12 as a separate program, Opera Mail 1.0 (build 1040), for Windows and Mac. It received a single update: build 1044 for Windows, published in February 2016 together with Opera 12.18, the last Presto release.
Opera's web-based mail is a different story: see My Opera Mail and FastMail.
The Opera Mail window, as explained in Opera's help.
Related
- Opera 4, the first with a full e-mail client
- Opera 7, the first with M2
- Opera's help has pages on e-mail, feeds and chat
- Opera Mail 1.0 on the FTP archive