1. Opera Mail – An Alternative to Thunderbird
Opera Mail
This article is a summary of my experiences on Opera Mail as a good alternative to
Thunderbird (my previous mail client).
A few days ago I had serious performance problems with my OpenSuSE Linux systems and I
soon discovered that is was due to Thunderbird using most of my machine resources (at some
points ps showed 101% of the cpu and more than 60% of memory used by Thunderbird,
I found on the Internet that this may happen when some of the mail folders have been
corrupted. Thunderbird stores all data in a profile directory that on my Linux installation was
called ,thunderbird and was stored in my home account. I tried to rename the profile directory
.thunderbird.old, to re-install Thunderbird and then tried to copy the mail folders from the old to
the new profile.
However I had problems with the data copied from the Local Folders and finally. after reading
that Mozilla is pulling the plug on Thunderbird, its popular email client. I decided to try some
alternatives.
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2. Opera Mail comes integrated into the Opera web browser. It provides a powerful collection of
integrated options for organising messages. It is not an open source program but it is free and
works on many platforms including Linux.
Opera Mail Installation
The installation of Opera Mail is pretty simple and didn’t give me any trouble. When I started
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3. Opera I found an option to add email accounts and I used it to re-create all my mail accounts
stored on my servers. When I accessed them they accessed correctly all my previous email in
both the received and sent boxes.
I then decided to copy the emails stored previously in the Thunderbird Local Folders and I could
do that by using the import functions provided by Opera.
To start, one clicks on the Opera button at the top and select Mail and Chat accounts from the
context menu and then clicks on Add > Import email > Import from Thunderbird.
On the following screen, one needs to click on browse and select the Thunderbird prefs.js file
that is found in the Thunderbird profile folder (in my case the.profile.old that I had saved from
my previous Thunderbird installation)
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4. Opera will import all messages from the selected mail folder but not the underlying folder
structure.
Therefore I could not import directly from the ‘Local Folders’ directory, but I had to do that for
each sub-dictory. after re-creating the folder in the Opera environment.
Importing may take a few minutes depending on the number of emails that are stored in each
mail folder. It took about three or four minutes to import about 20,000 emails from one account.
Opera Mail Differences
Thunderbird creates individual email folders for each email box and Local Folder’ whereas
Opera uses a unified approach based on Views. Mails are centrally stored but may be accessed
by email account by using one of the provided views.
Opera Mail displays a unified mailbox at the top where messages from all accounts are listed
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5. in. The email sidebar furthermore lists mailing lists that you are subscribed to or are receiving
messages from, labels, attachments sorted by type, and after that inbox and sent folders for all
accounts individually.
The attachment view allows to access directly attachments received with the emails.
Generally I found that you can manage emails and attachments in a faster way compared with
Thunderbird.
For instance in Thinderbird I had to view each mail account individually, whereas with Opera I
found that I could read immediately all my mails and that I needed to access single email
accounts only for special searches.
Another important difference is that Opera was designed to run well even on low-end and small
computers, and with a commitment to computer accessibility for users who may have visual or
mobility impairments.
Conclusions
Generally I am pretty happy with my Opera Mail client and also the mail management seems to
be more natural and faster
Moreover I found that Opera Mail uses much less computer resources than my previous
Thunderbird installation and the response times are better.
References
Thunderbird Alternative Opera Mail from gHacks.net
Thunderbird alternatives from zdnet.com
Opera Mail Tutorial
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