Now this is forever

Another standard feature missing in Opera is word-by-word text selection in web pages.

In other browsers (Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox), you can double-left-click on a word, hold the button and then drag. When you drag, the selection expands/contracts by each word instead of each character.

There's a thread and reddit post about this.

Browsers differ slightly in their implementations. For example, Chrome allows you to control whether the space after the word is selected or not. Firefox doesn't. Chrome's way is nicer.

Opera doesn't support this on web pages or rich text editors at all. But, it does work in Opera in textareas though.

Another standard feature missing in Opera's built-in mail client is support for connecting to an LDAP server to lookup Contacts.

This is useful for having contact info of all the employees/customers on a server that all the employees can access. The contact list can be shown as a group in the mail client's address book and can be used to autocomplete addresses when you type. And, when the contact list is updated, everybody gets the updates.

Sylpheed, Claws Mail and Thunderbird support LDAP for example. Opera doesn't support this at all, which is another downside to using Opera for business.

Another standard feature missing in Opera's built-in mail client is support for aliases and global SMTP accounts.

Some mail providers allow you to have mutliple identities (also called aliases) for the same mail account.

Each identity has its own settings like: email address, name, signature, reply-to, whether to compose in HTML by default, what smtp account (username, password, server name, port, connection security etc.) to use, what vCard to attach, what reply style to use and what sent, drafts, archive and template folders to put messages in etc.

When you compose a new message, you can choose what identity to use. And, when you reply to a message, what identity is used for the reply by default depends on the email address the message was sent to. So, if you have to1@example.com and to1+test@example.com identities and someone sends you a message to to1+test@example.com, if you reply to that message, the identity settings for to1+test@example.com will be used by default instead of to1@example.com's.

Further, you can then filter messages by what identity they're for and tag/mark messages by rules etc.

Having multiple identities allows you to use different email addresses all from the same account. For example, you could create a you+junk@example.com identity that you use for signing up for stuff so you don't have to reveal the address for your main identity.

To do all that stuff with a mail provider that doesn't support identities requires you to sign up and create a new account for each. And, if you do, you may not be able to see messages from all the accounts in a single interface (for webmail interfaces at least) and you will probably have problems logging into all accounts at once (cookie issues). Having multiple identiities gets rid of those problems.

Mail providers that support multiple identities support this stuff in their webmail interface. But, if you want to use the mail account with a local mail client *also*, your mail client also needs to support multiple identities. Otherwise, you're going to be extremely limited and annoyed when you have to deal with messages you receive as they'll be sent to different identities and replying to the messages won't use the right email address and signature etc. But, even if a mail provider doesn't support multiple identities, you can at least use the multiple identity support in your mail client.

Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo and Hotmail are examples of mail providers that support multiple identities. These are extremely popular services.

The problem is, Opera doesn't support multiple indentities for the same mail account at all. This means that if you use multiple identities in any of those, Opera's built-in mail client isn't much fun to use.

Now, there are things you can do to kind of hack in identities into Opera. But, they're inefficient (extra copy of a message for each identity) and replying doesn't choose the right fake identity if unless you reply to the right copy. The former you can avoid by not specifying the incoming server. But, the downside to that is you can't specify a an IMAP sent folder. There's just no good way to make it work in Opera's built-in mail client.

For an example of good multiple identity support, check out Thunderbird. On the main page in an account's settings, you'll see a "manage identities" button where you can add each new identity for the account. Check out all the settings each identity has. Each identity pretty much has all the settings a full mail account has except for the incoming server.

Now, another thing you'll notice in an identity's settings in Thunderbird is that you can choose what smtp server and account to use. This is because in Thunderbird, an smtp account is not tied to an IMAP/POP account. SMTP accounts are global (with one being the default). This provides flexibility in general and with identities. Opera doesn't support this either.

Another standard feature that's missing in Opera's built-in mail client is support for the IMAP4 QUOTA extension.

In some mail clients like Thunderbird, if your IMAP server account has a storage limit (and most do) and it supports QUOTA, you can check the properties of an IMAP folder to see how much space your messages are taking and what the limit is. In Thunderbird's case, each IMAP folder reports the total space used for the account and not the IMAP folder in question (because they all share the same quota root of "").

Opera doesn't support this at all so you can't tell how much of your quota you've used up. You have to rely on your mail provider's webmail if there is one.

Another standard feature missing in Opera's built-in mail client is support for pasting images from the clipboard into the body field of an HTML message you're composing.

In Thunderbird, Evolution and Eudora for example, if you copy an image to the clipboard, you can focus the body and hit ctrl + v to insert that image into the HTML body. This will embed the image data into the source of the message as a base64-encoded part with a content-id specified. Then, the src attribute for the img element in the HTML markup will reference the attachment via a cid: URI that references the content id.

Opera doesn't support this at all.

Thunderbird even allows you to drag and drop a file from your desktop into the HTML body to do the same. In Opera, this always just attaches the file even if you're dragging it to the HTML body field.

There's a thread about this here.

On a side, Firefox does something pretty cool. It supports pasting images from the clipboard into rich text editors on a web page. When doing this, the image data is embedded in the src attribute for the img element as a base64 data URI. Other browsers don't support this though.