Mail panel reappears when Opera is restarted

I decided to have a peek at Opera's mail client, and am wondering if a certain behaviour is a bug or feature.

For mail/chat accounts I just have a single Windows Live mail set up that is not set to autocheck (Opera11.6/Win7x64).

When I go to Mail>Read mail, Opera opens the mail panel and a new tab for reading mail (I know about the auto mail panel toggle, but I'm fine with it opening when I intend to go to mail). If I click the 'x' on the tab, everything goes away (mail tab + mail panel). The 'problem' is that if I close Opera, the next time I open it the mail panel automatically opens (but no mail tab). I would expect that since the mail panel was closed when I shut down the program, it would still be closed when I reopen).

To avoid this, I have to first close the mail panel, then the mail tab. I'd prefer to just close the mail tab and have everything disappear (which it does, but the mail panel will be showing on restart).

Is this a bug or feature that the mail panel will show on start even though it was not showing on exit (unless I close it first, then close the mail tab).

I'd close down Opera and delete autosave.win in the sessions folder. It's in the preferences folder. See if that helps.

If you're starting with a saved session, you might want to delete that session and recreate it.

You might want to rename operaprefs.ini so Opera creates a new one. See if that helps too. If it doesn't, you can restore your old one.

Originally posted by Just Jam:

Is this a bug or feature that the mail panel will show on start even though it was not showing on exit

Sounds like a bug. Not sure though. I don't use "Menu -> Mail -> Read Mail". I goto "shift + F12 -> panels" and enable the panel toggle on the left edge of the screen. I use that (or F4) to open/close the panel list and with the mail panel always selected and expanded, it works great to open/close the mail panel. Doing things that way doesn't really invoke the "auto mail panel toggle" behavior the same either.

Thanks. I tried in new profile and it's the same. I'm thinking it's a bug rather than intended behaviour: that the flag to show the panel gets set when it appears on autotoggle, but isn't unset if the panel closes automatically along with the tab (the panel has to be closed directly). I'll get around to making a bug report on it.

Originally posted by Just Jam:

Thanks. I tried in new profile and it's the same.

Hmm, there must be some extra step that I'm not doing. I can't reproduce the problem.

I just noticed it doesn't happen if the panel strip is already open when you go to read mail. Then the mail panel does not return on restart.

To reproduce, have mail panel toggle turned on, and the panel strip not showing.
Go to mail>read mail (panel strip + mail panel + mail tab will appear)
Close mail tab (panel strip + mail panel + mail tab all disappear)
Close Opera and restart (mail panel pops back up, but it shouldn't.. and doesn't if you closed it before closing the mail tab, or if the panel strip was already open before going to mail>read mail).

I just tried a fresh install on an XP virtual machine and get the same thing again.

Damn, I tried all of that on Win7 x64 with fresh install of 11.60 a bunch of times and still cannot reproduce it. Does it matter how you close the mail tab? Are you using the x on the tab or middle-click or a gesture (if it matters) to close it?

Are you using "continue from last time" or some saved session?

It doesn't seem to matter how the mail tab is closed (x, middle click, etc). I do use 'continue from last time', but tried starting with home page and the same thing happens. I never mess with sessions.

I reproduced the problem 4 out of 100 times. I'll mess with it later to see if I can figure out how to trigger it better. How fast are you closing Opera after closing the mail tab? Right away, maybe even fast enough that Opera doesn't get a chance to write the state of the panel to disk?

There have been times where it was many minutes between closing the panel and shutting down Opera. I'm not sure that would matter, though, as Opera's exe continues to run for a few seconds after closing the window while it takes care of whatever it needs to take care of before finally closing. But there were definitely cases where there was a long period between mail close and program close. Plus there is never a problem if the mail panel is closed directly.. it's just the panel auto close when the mail tab is closed where the field is not getting set somewhere.

Thanks for having a look. It's not a huge issue, though. I'll make a bug report and if it turns out to be not just a special case for me then perhaps it will be fixed some day.