Opera Mail review: Email client is a blast from the past
I always liked the sleek, useful Mail component of Opera, back when the iconoclastic browser was trying to be all things for all people. Now that Opera’s dramatically slimmed down its browser, it’s turned Opera Mail into a standalone program. Though Opera Mail made a bad first impression in my testing, it eventually won me over with its intelligent features and dogged competence.
Its interface won’t win any beauty prizes, but underneath, Opera Mail is a sturdy and capable mail client.
Greetings from 10 years ago!
Opera Mail reminds me of Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird—with a similar rickety, aging substructure that particularly shows in its initial setup. (Opera Mail does use Mozilla source code.) Modern email clients often make importing or creating accounts a snap, but Opera’s import features didn’t really work at all.
When I selected the Import from Apple Mail option, Opera couldn’t find the files it needed; they may have been revised out of existence by newer versions of Mail.app. The only other import options, besides the equally unhelpful “generic mbox,” were Opera, Eudora, or Netscape.
After I shrugged and set up a new account manually, things started looking up. I was able to add a Gmail account via IMAP with very little trouble. And while it doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, Opera Mail is one of the rare modern clients to still support POP mail. It also builds in support for RSS feeds and Usenet newsgroups, a nice feature in an age when most other clients no longer incorporate those services.
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