My Opera Mail and FastMail 1998 – 2013

OperaMail, Opera's first webmail

OperaMail, at www.operamail.com, was a free webmail service provided by Opera Software. The oldest archived copy of its homepage dates from December 1998. Like most free webmail services of the time, it was run by an outside provider: in 2000, opera.com explained that it was "powered by Infinite Technologies", whose InterChange WebMail software also appears at the bottom of the page.

Opera buys FastMail

On April 30, 2010, Opera announced that it had acquired FastMail.FM, a web-based e-mail provider headquartered in Australia, praised for its responsiveness, its security and its support for open, interoperable standards. Opera wanted to "offer a consistent e-mail experience across all products", on computers, phones, TVs and game consoles, next to the mail client it had built into its desktop browser since Opera 4.

FastMail kept its own name and its paying customers: personal accounts, family accounts and business e-mail hosting, usable from any e-mail program, with web folders for files and photos, and no advertising.

My Opera Mail

On April 7, 2011, the new Opera mail team opened My Opera Mail Beta at mail.opera.com. From that day, every My Opera account also had an @myopera.com e-mail address: you logged in with the same user name and password as on My Opera, Opera Link or Opera Unite, and new users could create an account in a few seconds.

The service was based on FastMail's systems, but large parts were rewritten as a fast AJAX application, with a dedicated interface for Opera Mini on phones, large buttons for tablets and keyboard shortcuts on computers. Most of the team worked from Melbourne, and moved into a larger office, painted "in white and Opera red", in November 2011. Over the following months it added a rich text editor, an XMPP chat server for @myopera.com users, filtering rules, a new contacts interface (July 2012) and undo (December 2012); FastMail received the same improvements.

OperaMail moved to the same systems: by January 2012, operamail.com was "finally back where it belongs: hosted and run directly by Opera Software", powered by FastMail, and existing users could log in with their old account.

Independent again

After Opera changed its strategy in 2013, an e-mail service no longer fitted its plans. On September 25, 2013, FastMail announced that its developers and staff had bought the company back from Opera, keeping all its staff, and that FastMail was once again an independent company. The last copy of mail.opera.com in our archive dates from August 2013.