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Opera Mail Tutorial

Writing and Sending Messages

Opera's e-mail client uses format=flowed formatting for messages, making them more readable for you and for those receiving messages from you. In addition, there are various other features to make sending messages simple and powerful.

Quick Reply

One of Opera Mail's unique features is "Quick reply", which is useful for brief, chat-like correspondence. In a message window, type your message in the "Quick reply" field at the bottom of the window and click on the "Quick reply" button to send it. The original message will be quoted in the reply, and it will be sent to all recipients of the original message. When quick replying to a news message, your reply will be sent to the message sender's e-mail address. You can disable the "Quick reply" field under the "View" button in message list windows.

Message Drafts

You can save a message to the "Drafts" view by clicking on the "Save" button. While you are composing a message, Opera will also periodically save it automatically. After you send the message, it will be moved from "Drafts" to "Sent".

Contacts

If you have added a contact for the message recipient, simply start typing their name or e-mail address and a drop-down will appear with matching contacts. You can also select contacts by clicking on the "To" button. A list of contacts and contact folders will appear, including the option, "Add all contacts in folder", which will add all the contacts in the current folder (but not nested folders) as message recipients.

Message Composition Font

To change the font used in the message composition window, open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Fonts, choose "Interface compose e-mail", press button "choose", and select your desired font.

Message Encoding

Using the encoding drop-down, you can override the encoding setting for your account on a per-message basis. If the current message contains characters that are not part of the selected encoding, Opera Mail will ask what action to take when saving a draft or sending the message. The default override value is "UTF-8".

View Button

From the "View" button in the message composition window, you can choose which message header fields to show when composing messages. Settings apply to the account currently selected in the "From" field only, which means that if you have two accounts you want to change, you have to change each account individually.

The "Reply-To", "Automatically CC", and "Automatically BCC" fields are automatically filled (and cannot be disabled) if the relevant fields are populated in account settings. (Tools > Mail and chat accounts > (Account) Edit > General.).

Redirecting a message

In addition to forwarding and replying to messages, you can also redirect them. When redirecting a message, certain message headers (Resent-To, Resent-From, Resent-Date, and Resent-Message-ID) are used to specify the message redirector, while the original sender, date, and message-id headers are maintained. In other words, a message appears as if it is coming from the original sender, though it is still possible to establish that it was actually sent by a third-party. When redirecting a message, Opera inserts the original message body, but does not quote it.

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