M2 Tutorial - Setting your preferences

Account properties

To change settings of your account go to Mail --> Manage Accounts, select the desired account and click "Edit". You will now get the preferences panel with four tabs, General, Servers, Incoming and Outgoing. The property windows described below are for a standard POP account. They may differ for IMAP and news accounts.

General

Account name: This is the name of your account and is displayed throughout M2.
Account category: Here you can enter or select a category to which this account belongs. This category can then be selected in the Account Selector in the hotlist or under Mail --> Show Accounts.
Full Name: This is your name that will appear in the From field when you send a message to someone.
Mail address: This is the mail address that belongs to this account.
Organization: The organization you work for.
Reply-to: If you want replies send to a different e-mail address than you sent it from, you can set that address here.
Automatically CC: If you want to automatically add one or more e-mail addresses to you outgoing e-mail, add them here.
Automatically BCC: Similar to automatic CC.

Servers

Incoming POP server: This is where you put your ISP's pop server. It is often pop3.your-isp.com.
Port number: This set by default to 110 and should only be changed if given specific instructions by your ISP.
Secure connection (TLS): If your ISP requires a secure connection you can set this here.
Authentication: This option sets the security protocol with which M2 retrieves the mail from the server. It defaults to Auto but you can manually change it to any of the following settings: AUTH CRAM-MD5 / APOP / AUTH LOGIN / Plaintext / None. This is for advanced users only!
Username: This is often the first part of your e-mail address.
Password: Regardless of the length of your password, M2 will always truncate it to 6 asteriks to protect your privacy.
Outgoing SMTP server: This is the server you send your outgoing mail to and is often smtp.your-isp.com. All other settings for SMTP are similar to the ones described above for POP3.

Incoming

Mark messages as read if already downloaded: If messages have already been retrieved from the server from another computer, M2 can automatically mark those messages as read.
Download message body when checking: This option is on by default for POP3. A longer description is given in the IMAP section.
Keep local copy of message body: This option is on by default for POP3. A longer description is given in the IMAP section.
Check for new messages every #minutes: When you are not on a dialup connection it might be useful to automatically check for new e-mail on a regular interval.
Include account when checking manually: When unchecked this account will not be included when checking e-mail manually by pressing Ctrl-K or the button on the Mail panel.
Play sound when message arrives: Here you can select a wav-file to play when a new message arrives.

Outgoing

Default encoding: If your language requires a different default encoding for your e-mails you can set it here.
Automatically wrap outgoing messages: This option will wrap the text after a certain number of characters. You will not notice it when composing a message though, it is done when sending.
Queue message (do not send immediately): When on dialup this option is useful when writing a number of replies offline and sending them all together once online.
Send queued e-mail after checking e-mail: This option will first check e-mail before sending the queued ones.
Add contact when sending message: With this option checked a new contact will be added to your Contacts panel whenever you send an e-mail to someone not yet in your list.
Signature: This is discussed in detail on a previous page.

E-mail display

The way M2 displays the e-mails is defined by means of CSS. This means you can easily change the appearance if you know something about CSS. The file used for the e-mail rendering is mime.css and can be found in the Opera directory /Styles. Mimehead.css is used for the rendering of the headers in the e-mail.

If you use a skin designed by Lars Kleinschmidt, chances are you will find custom css files for those skins at his website so that the mailwindow is also styled along with the skin.

If you are not really into css, but want to tweak some things, they are described here below.

Remove "all headers" link

Locate the following section.

omf|showheaders 
{ 
color : blue;
position : absolute;
top : 5px;
right : 7px;
font : status-bar;
-o-link : attr(href);
text-decoration : underline;
-o-link-source : current;
}

Add the following line there

display:none;

Now save the file and you will no longer see the link. Just remove this line again to see it again.

Show a certain header bold

If you want the Subject line to be like Subject: subject here instead of Subject: subject here, that too can be done with css.

Find the line in mime.css saying:

omf|hdr[name="Subject"] {display:table-row;}

and change it into

omf|hdr[name="Subject"] {display:table-row; font-weight:bold;}

You can ofcourse do this for any header, just by editing the appropriate line in the mime.css!

Background image

If you wish to place a background-image behind the messages you are reading, this too can easily be done with CSS

omf|mime
{
 background: Window;
 display: block;
 background-image: url(yourimagehere.jpg);
 height: 100%; /* this is important! */
}
 
omf|body, omf|div
{
 background-color: transparent; /* this is important! */
 color: black;
 display: block;
 padding: 0;
}

Take notice that the background-color to the omf|body and omf|div is transparent!

Advanced tweakery

Not all M2 settings are available from the UI. Such as already mentioned the mime.css file controls the layout of the e-mails. There are more settings and they can be found in the accounts.ini file in your Mail directory (Help --> About Opera). A selection is given here.

Attribution lines

Reply=On %:Date:, %f wrote:
Forward=\n\n------- Forwarded message -------\nFrom: %:From:\nTo: %:To:\nSubject: %:Subject:\nDate: %:Date:\n

The parameters for Reply and Forward are described on my M2 Resources page.

Quote Depth

Remove Signature On Reply=1
Max QuoteDepth On Reply=-1
Max QuoteDepth On QuickReply=2

The maximum level of quoting can be set by changing the value for "Max QuoteDepth On Reply=". Setting it to 0 will strip all quoting when replying and setting it to -1 leaves all quotes intact. You can also set if you want to remove the signature when replying.

Traffic logging

Incoming Log File=
Outgoing Log File=

You can set M2 to log all incoming and outgoing traffic to a file. Warning! This file will quickly grow very large and your passwords will be visible in this file!

Various

Linelength=76
Xface=
Signature File=C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Opera\OPERA7\Mail\signature1.txt

Other options include the number of characters after which to wrap and also the ability to add an X-Face. M2 will send the X-Face but will not (yet) display it.

File Structure

Unlike other e-mail programs such as Outlook Express, M2 does not store its e-mails on a per-folder basis. For instance OE has outbox.mbs which contains all e-mails shown in the outbox.

As a result of its database-like nature, M2 does not do this and stores the files in seemingly arbitrary mbox files. To back up a certain View, the best approach would be to export the view or accesspoint.

You can read more on the file structure on the Resources page.