Introduction
Opera 7 comes with a totally rewritten mail and news client, with support for POP3, IMAP and (E)SMTP. The client (called M2) has many new, innovative and unique features. This means that in many respects, M2 behaves differently from most other mailers, and therefore requires some additional instructions to get the best out of M2's options.
This tutorial is targeted at all M2 users; both newcomers and more experienced users. It will attempt to discuss M2 in a step-by-step fashion but it will also be as comprehensive as possible, covering as many as possible of M2's features.
New users are advised to start reading at the first page, but existing users may best jump around the tutorial to find the information they need. The TOC should provide a good overview of the contents. There is also a TOC panel available which shows the TOC in Opera's hotlist.
Why use M2?
Everyone probably has their own personal reasons for using M2 (or not), but why do I like it so much? Well, M2 ...
- ... just works! It allows me to spend my time on dealing with my incoming e-mail without spending needless time on organizing it! Threaded mailinglists, Spam filter, contacts and of course the accesspoints. It all works quickly and easily without having to set up any filter! It is all done automagically!
- ... comes bundled with the Opera webbrowser. I really enjoy having all my internet-related activities within one program: no more switching application when writing e-mails, all within the same wonderful program that is Opera7!
- ... is the best e-mail client I have ever used! :-)
If you would like to explain why you like/dislike M2, let me know!
About this document
This document was originally written for Opera 7.0 beta1 and the original version can be found here. It was extensively rewritten for Opera 7.20 to include the new features and to make it more accessible to new M2 users.
Some important changes have been made to M2 since Opera 7.23, including a totally new default skin, meaning that the screenshots are out of date. In the forsee-able future there There will NOT be an update to this tutorial. For updated information I refer to Official M2 Tutorial.
Navigation
This page makes use of several Opera7 features to ease the navigation.
- skip to the next/previous page by using the buttons on the Navigation Bar (with keyboard by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Left or Ctrl-Shift-Right)
- use the FastForward button on the toolbar or use your favourite Forward movement to go to the next page (Alt-Left, X, mouse-gesture).
- The easiest way is nonetheless the space-bar: pressing it will scroll the page down until you reach the bottom of the page. Then you will jump to the next page automagically!
- This page also supports OperaShow. Just press F11 to see it and navigate with PageUp/PageDown.
One important note concerning images: large images are scaled to fit to the text width. By clicking on the image, you will get a larger version!
Under the bonnet
All code in this document is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.0 written in Notepad. Though being standards compliant, this page was not so much designed with cross-browser compatibility in mind as it is intended for M2 users, which implies they use Opera7 for viewing the page. Future revisions will however try to improve cross-browser compatibility.
All screenshots are made with IrfanView and the png files were subsequently compressed with PNGCrush which did wonders to the file-size of the images!
Copyright?
This Tutorial is written by Mark Schenk and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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