M2 Tutorial: A closer look

Accesspoint description

[Accesspoints] The accesspoints are situated in the hotlist, under the "Mail" tab. The hotlist is very important in M2 and should be open when reading e-mail. You can open the hotlist under View --> Hotlist or by pressing F4.

An overview will be given of the accesspoints presently available, starting from top to bottom. You may or may not see some of the accesspoints I mention, but they will appear when needed. For instance the mailing lists accesspoint will not appear if you are not subscribed to a mailing list.

Double-clicking on an accesspoint will open a split-pane window listing all e-mails in that accesspoint at the top and the message content at the bottom. When an e-mail window already has been opened and is at the front, simply clicking once on the accesspoint will open the content in the window.

Unread mails

This is where the unread mails are shown. You can easily determine which e-mails to show in this accesspoint by using the View button on the mail toolbar. This will be discussed in the Mail view options.

In M2 the e-mails in the unread accesspoint are not marked read automatically. By pressing "K" or clicking on the button on the mail toolbar the e-mail can be marked as read. Pressing "G" will mark the message as read and will select the next unread message.

The unread e-mails may have different colours.

A message in bold text is unread.
If the text is additionally coloured maroon, it means that it has either not been viewed before or downloaded from the server before. So if you have downloaded your messages from the server from a different location, M2 will colour it black to show that it has been downloaded before (provided the server supports this).
Messages in plaintext are read.

All Messages

[All Messages accesspoint] The "All Messages" area is where the e-mails are actually stored.

Received: The "Received" accesspoint is the repository (the mail database) where all received e-mail is stored and from which all other accesspoints retrieve the e-mails.
Outbox: The Outbox contains queued messages. These are outgoing messages that have not yet been sent to the server. You can set M2 to immediately send messages or to queue them in the outbox before manually sending them from Mail -> Send -> Send queued.
Sent: Copies of all messages sent by you can be found here. In other views they can be recognized by the upwards pointing arrow in the heading list.
Drafts: M2 automatically saves a draft version of your e-mail while you are composing it. You can also manually save it from the toolbar on the Compose window.
Spam: M2 comes provided with a spam filter. The level of this filter can be adjusted to "Off", "Medium" and "Strong" by changing the settings under the right-click menu of the Spam folder > Properties > Filter. The default value is "Medium". As you can see, you can also add custom filters to the Spam folder.

M2 shows all mail which it recognizes as spam, in the spam folder. Here you can determine whether the mail is spam or not. When it is not spam, you click on the appropriate button on the toolbar, the e-mail becomes accessible to accesspoints and the sender is added to your contacts.
Trash: E-Mails you delete are sent to the trash folder. You can empty the trash by manually deleting the messages in Trash or by right-clicking on the accesspoint and selecting "Empty trash".

Views

In M2 filters are placed on 'Views' and they are also accesspoints so it is possible to filter the same e-mail into different Views. You can add Views by right-clicking and selecting "New View".

The filtering criteria of a folder can be edited by right-clicking on a view and selecting "Properties". It is possible to add and combine multiple filters per view in the dialog shown above along and since O7.20 filtering also allows the use of Regular Expressions (RegExp). The syntax is based on Perl5.

A number of actions are possible with the filters. I will not treat them into detail, as there is an excellent tutorial written about this, the quality of which I cannot attempt to equal: scipio's and MarcFou's M2 FilterGuide.

Hide messages from other views: This way you can emulate classical folders by making filtered results only visible in this view. If a message is filtered into two Views and both Views have this option enabled, the message will appear in both views, but not in any other. This avoids prioritizing certain Views.
Mark matching messages as read: This option automatically marks the filtered messages as read.
Inherit filter from parent: When used, this option will only filter within the results of its parent folder.
Filter existing messages: This will apply the filter to all the existing messages, as well as future incoming messages

It is also possible to add specific e-mails to a view, without them being filtered. This is done by right-clicking on an e-mail and selecting the 'Show in' option.

In Opera 7.20 an extra feature was added: "Show in" -> "This folder and add filter". You are then presented with the following dialog.

To remove an e-mail from a folder, but not delete it entirely you can press Ctrl-X, or select the option in the drop-down button next to the "Delete" button on the mail toolbar.

To emphasize: M1's centralized filtering system is replaced by a 'per folder' filter in M2.

Active Contacts

Contacts with whom you have a lot of correspondence or who you recently selected in the contacts tab, are shown here for easy access. The number of active contacts is limited to 20 when Opera is running, and 10 when Opera is restarted.

Active Threads

Conversations you recently took part in, are shown here in threaded view. This accesspoint will appear automagically.

Labels

[Labels] When viewing an e-mail, it can be given a label by selecting it from the dropdown box on the mail toolbar. You can choose between things like "to do", "call back", "important" etc.

The e-mails with the same labels can be viewed from the "Labels" accesspoint. This feature can make organizing your e-mail much easier.

Labelling is especially easy with keyboard shortcuts, just press L followed by a number between 1-7 for the appropriate label. Quick 'n' Easy! :)

Searches

A useful feature is the "sticky" search. When you perform a search (either from the inline searchfield in the hotlist or from Mail --> Search), the search "sticks" : it is placed as an accesspoint in the hotlist. This also means that it will also filter future mail that fit the search criteria.

You can search for different criteria and also use different types of search. The "Each word" search is somewhat similar to the Google way of searching: the search results contain these words. By adding a - (minus) in front of a search term you determine that the phrase must not be included in the results. Any word without a minus in front of it is always part of the search.

You can also use the "Quick find" feature available from the mail view window to search incrementally through the e-mails available in the current folder/accesspoint.

Attachments

[Attachments] You can view all e-mails with certain kinds of attachments here. This makes it easy to exchange files with other people through e-mail. Also notice how the name of the attachment is shown in a column in the mail view window.

It is not possible to add filters for other specific types of attachments.

Mailing lists

M2 can recognize many of your mailing lists. (It is currently not possible to add more mailing lists manually.) Mailing lists are automatically displayed in threaded form - messages that are part of one discussion are grouped together, showing you at a glance who said what to whom, and when. It is obviously much easier to follow discussions this way, rather than trying to pick them out from among many other messages in an unthreaded list. Once you try this, you will never want to go back!

Not all mailing lists are recognized by M2 because they lack the proper headers, which would identify them as mailing lists. In that case you will have to make a folder with a filter.

Deleting e-mail

When you delete an e-mail from an accesspoint, this effectively removes it from all accesspoints! This is by design and find its root in the concept of accesspoints where only one copy of an e-mail is stored. To remove and e-mail from a View, but keep it in your Received folder, you must use Ctrl-X.

When deleting a message the above window is shown.

Mail view options

[Mail View] It is possible to fine-tune which e-mail to show in the various accesspoints. This is done via the View button on the mail toolbar. Some of the options of this button are also directly available on the toolbar, but I will discuss the options in the order they come in this menu.

Threaded/Flat: This toggles threading of messages in an accesspoint.
Time: Here you can set how old the messages in the accesspoint are. Setting it to Three Months for instance, means that only the messages received during the last three months will be displayed.
Type: Various types of messages are present in M2 (trash/spam/read/mailing lists/newsgroups) and you can set which types to show in which individual accesspoint. So for instance by default the Unread accesspoint shows all types except 'read' and 'trash'.
Display: In this menu you can set how e-mails should be displayed. If someone sends you an HTML e-mail you may prefer to view the plain text variant. You can set this here. An important privacy setting is 'suppress external embeds'. What this does is prevent e-mails from accessing files on an online server. This is an often used tactic by spammers to see if a message has been received or not. It is advised not to change this setting!
Mark As Read: By default M2 will not mark messages as read, but you can set this to be automatically after a number of settings. This will ofcourse not apply to the Unread accesspoint.
E-Mail display: Here you can set how to display the e-mail views: either the listing of e-mails, a separate mail window or both. In Opera 7.2 you can now double-click on an e-mail in the list and it will open maximized.
Toggle Quick Reply: Here you can also turn off the QuickReply field below the e-mail view. This feature will be discussed further on in this document.

Mail context menu

When right-clicking on an e-mail in message list you will be presented with the following context menu.

Most of the options in the menu are very self-explanatory, but what is important to note is that almost all regular actions have their keyboard-shortcut, making it very easy to speed up your work! The abundance of keyboard shortcuts will be discussed right now. :)

Keyboard shortcuts

Opera wouldn't be Opera if there weren't plenty of keyboard shortcuts in M2 and they can even be changed and tweaked in the Preferences. I will not discuss that here, but only mention the most important default keyboard shortcuts.

Remember, Ctrl B is your friend: it gives you a complete listing of keyboard shortcuts in Opera, including M2.

One-Key-Reading

There is a nice feature in M2 which makes it possible to do most of your mailreading with just one key: the space bar!

What does it do? Well, if a message is unread, it functions as PageDown so you can read the message. If the bottom of the message is reached it functions as "Go to next unread" and once again becomes PageDown, etc. If all messages are read, it will now function as "Go to next message" and becomes PageDown again! Nifty he?

Shortcuts

Most keyboard shortcuts can be found in Opera's helpfiles by pressing Ctrl-B but it forgets to mention a few important ones:

F7 focuses the panels and by using Tab you can navigate between the various fields there.
F8 focuses the list view.
F9 focuses the mail view.

My favourite shorcut must be G (mark as read and go to next unread). I use it all the time! I use keyboard navigation for most of my browsing and mail reading and M2 really makes it easy to do my work quickly and efficiently. There is some room for improvement left, but it already works nicely!

Multiple account handling

As discussed earlier, M2 does not distinguish between e-mails from different accounts. This is by design and by default.

However from O7.2 upwards it is possible to set which Accounts to show under Mail --> Show accounts. This setting immediately applies to all access points. You can choose to show All acccounts, all mail accounts, all news accounts, an account category, or all accounts separately.

You can set the account categories under the Account properties as discussed further on. It is also possible to place an account selector in the Mail panel, similar to the one found in Opera6.

Contacts

In contrast to other mail programs, M2 doesn't require you to do a lot of work creating and maintaining entries in an address book. The Contacts list follows naturally from M2's use of accesspoints: each contact is an accesspoint. By clicking on the contact, you get to see all the e-mails from that person. You can find the contacts in the Contacts panel in the Hotlist and organizing them is similar to the bookmarks.

To add a contact to your list, just press "A" when viewing an e-mail (or select the option in the right-click menu or on the mail toolbar). The idea is to add all your contacts to the contacts list, so that you can easily spot an e-mail from an unknown person by the blank icon to the left of the e-mail.

In the contacts properties (right-click, select "Properties") you can change the information of the contact and add an URL to a picture for instance. This picture will then be displayed when viewing the e-mail from that contact. It is also possible to add more than one e-mail address per contact under the Notes tab of the contacts properties; multiple addresses are separated by a comma.

Now when you click on a contact with additional e-mail addresses, you will get the e-mails sent to/from all those addresses. Behaviour is still buggy though. For instance when you compose a message, all additional addresses will be entered in the To field, and not merely the primary address.

Another helpful feature linked to the contacts system is the following: when reading an e-mail and you want to view all e-mails by the same person, just press "E" (or select the option in the right-click menu) and voila: a list of all the e-mails!

Manage contacts

The easiest location to manage all your contacts is under Mail --> Manage Contacts. You can obviously also manage them via the Contacts panel.

Filters

You can also set filters from one centralized location under Mail --> Filters. You will then get this dialog.

The options here are the same as described for the Views.

Exporting mail

From O7.2 upwards it is possible to export all e-mail in an access point or view by right-clicking on the access point in the hotlist and selecting Export. The messages will then be exported into a "standard Unix Mailbox" (mbx/mbs) file which can be imported by all major e-mail clients.

Exporting the messages will however lose all added value provided by M2 such as labels. The best way to create a complete backup of your files is to copy the entire Mail folder to a separate location and copy back when needed.

Quick 'n' Handy features

There are also plenty handy features in M2 which are often missed and I will try to list some here.

Mailto: links

Often a page author provides his e-mail address on his site and by clicking on it you will open the Compose window with the author's e-mail address automatically filled in. M2 offers more options when right-clicking on a mailto-link.

You can try this functionality on this link

Sending page links

When right-clicking on a page you can select "Send link by mail" and this will open the compose window, and will insert the page title in the Subject field and the page link in the mail body.

Sending selection

When you select some text on a webpage and right-click on the selection you can choose "Send by mail" and this will place the selected text into the body of the message and the url of the page in the Subject.

Notes integration

Opera 7.2 also offers basic Notes features to easily store quick notes from webpages and e-mails. This is also integrated into M2 and when you double-click on a Note, it is automatically sent by e-mail.

Copying raw e-mail message

Under some circumstances it is useful to obtain the raw e-mail message of a message. This can be done by selecting a message and pressing 'c'. This copies the content to the clipboard and you can now paste it into a text editor.

Security password

In Opera you can set a program-wide security password that can used for all e-mail accounts and Wand passwords. When using this password a heavy encryption is put on all your accounts, so you must not forget the password!

Without a security password, someone who could make a copy of your accounts.ini - file could use that file with any Opera installation to check your E-mail. A security password makes this impossible.

You can set the master password under Preferences --> Security and "Use it as a master password for e-mail and Wand" and choose when to have it asked for: Every time needed, Once per session or at a regular interval.