Reply and ask receipt requests

Reply and ask receipt requests

Hi,
Sorry to start with some rant: after a week experiencing Opera Browser and then the Opera mail client I am happy with the Browser but the E-mail client has been testing my patience to how much I can bear before going back completely to the Microsoft products despite some interesting features that the Opera e-mail client has - nevertheless too basic and lacks some features I miss now a much more comprehensive preferences menu where we should be able to control many more settings. The difficulty of the most obvious tasks (starting from importing the messages from Outlook Express or import its contacts - which should be obvious in both cases and is not; I had to find "ways of going around" each problem, sometimes involving much manual editing). Some e-mails arrive without text wrapping and I have to use the slide bars to read what's lying out of the window. Unfortunately the list would be longer....

Well, after giving a serious try to this e-mail client I started seeing that I could not find several basic features for a e-mail client in 2010.
The last one may be the the drop of water to make me leave it: I missed some receipt acknowledgements that people sent me. I could not believe that Opera did not notify me about them. After looking all over I was not able to find a simple tick where I could ask for a receipt or ask to be told that one has arrived.
Is that feature buried in some preferences that I am not finding? I found some quite old topics in the forum discussing this and concluding it is not possible to work with receipts in Opera (something basic and that is daily used in in many organizations).

Thanks.

Originally posted by frmo:

The difficulty of the most obvious tasks (starting from importing the messages from Outlook Express or import its contacts

Yes, this is unfortunate. But, the Outlook Express importer works pretty good besides a few subtle bugs. You can always convert to mbox format first and import that into Opera instead. Mbox is a standard after all, that's supported by lots of clients. Can't say that about OE's dbx format.

Opera doesn't have built-in support for importing OE's abook. But, converters are available at http://hallvord.com/opera and http://shadow2531.com/opera/contacts/oe_csv_to_opera_adr.zip with the latter being automatic.

However, importing from Opera to Outlook Express doesn't work at all

Originally posted by frmo:

After looking all over I was not able to find a simple tick where I could ask for a receipt or ask to be told that one has arrived.

Opera just doesn't support this. Every once in a while, someone asks about this. But, there's hasn't been many screaming for this feature. Personally, I've always found this option in other clients useless as no one honors receipts anyway and just ignores them.

But, yes, it'd be cool if Opera supported this for those that want to use it.

Originally posted by frmo:

I miss now a much more comprehensive preferences menu where we should be able to control many more settings.

Have examples?

Hi,
thanks for the help. Regarding importing contacts: I did it using csv and then used converter available online which was pointed out in an earlier post in this forum. That was done but, despite several attempts, the converter still got confused with many of my contacts and I ended up editing some 50 out of the 240 contacts by hand. Some of them appeared with the names duplicated. I tried to see the cause of that but could not identify. Nevertheless, that was bearable.
It lacks several fields available in OE for the contacts, which is bearable though.
I decided not to import the messages and start Opera e-mail client from scratch.

One thing I missed a lot: the possibility to simply drag and drop one e-mail into some folder in the hard drive or a pendrive so that I can take it to another location (from office to home for instance) and deal with it with more time and care at the other location or simply store it in a folder together with documents.

I miss options to edit the way of displaying a window where an e-mail is seem. I would like not to have to stick to a window that is always a tab. One option should allow me to make it float on the screen and place it wherever one wants. I understand that an extra Opera window can be created by dragging the tab onto the desktop but it's not quite the same.

I miss more options to how to display the text. I got e-mails with lines continuing out of the screen I could not find an option to make them wrap the text in the screen. I found an option to when I compose an e-mail but now for received ones.

I miss one option to decide what header to include when I reply. I do not like to have a simple line with
"On Tue, 11 May 2010 01:54:45 +0100, name <name@xx.uu.tt> wrote:"

I would like to reply with the full header, the same way that Opera e-mail client is doing when I Forward .:
"------- Forwarded message -------
From: "name" <name@xx.yy.tt>
To: xxxx@rr.uu
Cc:
Subject: bla bla
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 01:54:45 +0100"

There should be a way of controling what it displays when one replies to an e-mail.

I would like to find an option to set what happens when I double click (intending to open) an e-mail in the sent "view" for instance. When I double click them (just to check something) I get an action as if I wa intending to reply to it, which generates a e-mail to be composed.

Basically I would like to have a comprehensive preferences menu where many aspects could be controled. One One other example: I did not find a way of setting that a message that I delete could be immediately deleted insted of going to the tash bin. I understand the idea is to prevent disasters but sometimes a person is just certain he or she did some rubbish and wants to delete some message that was started by accident.

Inspite missing some features, I really loved the real-time spellchecker facility ! This will make me to decide not to change from Opera e-mail client to the Windows Life Messenger (which seems to be the successor to Outlook Express in Windows 7 - and Vista for that matter) but give a try to Thunderbird as it seems that it also features a simmilar real-time spell checker (hopefully multi-language as well).

Saddly, I really cannot use Oper e-mail client if it does not warn me of receipts and does not let me ask for them. From my experience this is widely used in organisations in contacts with admministrative contacts in academia (from administration offices to students, from academics to their suporting staff etc), with business contacts, and even personal contacts. For me its' really impossible to work not having access to receipt replies.
I will continue with Opera Browser - a nice discovery, but sadly I cannot use its e-mail client and will give a try to Thundebird as it seems it holds the best ideas I could see in Opera e-mail client but, according that what I read, it is claimed that it offers all features one my expect from an e-mail client.

Originally posted by frmo:

One One other example: I did not find a way of setting that a message that I delete could be immediately deleted insted of going to the tash bin.

There isn't a setting for this exactly. It's called "Delete permanently". You get this via shift + del, or right-clicking on a message list entry in the message list (or a selection of entries) and choosing "Delete permanently". Or, you can click the down arrow on the delete button on the toolbar and it'll bring up a menu for "delete permanently". You can even modify the keyboard shortcut for del to make it delete permanently so you don't have to hit shift too.

Originally posted by frmo:

I miss one option to decide what header to include when I reply.

Yes, this option isn't in the UI. But, you can edit accounts.ini in the mail folder. Look for the "Reply=" line for the account. Below it will be the "Forward=" line that will serve as an example.

Originally posted by frmo:

I would like to find an option to set what happens when I double click (intending to open) an e-mail in the sent "view" for instance. When I double click them (just to check something) I get an action as if I wa intending to reply to it, which generates a e-mail to be composed.

I definitely agree. This is annoying.

Originally posted by frmo:

I miss more options to how to display the text. I got e-mails with lines continuing out of the screen I could not find an option to make them wrap the text in the screen.

Messages usually are displayed wrapped. However, if you have a long run of text (or the sender sent the message without wrapping), you can indeed get a horizontal scrollbar. You could use the fit-to-width option. But, it's not working right for mail right now (you'll see it's grayed out).

Originally posted by frmo:

One thing I missed a lot: the possibility to simply drag and drop one e-mail into some folder in the hard drive

You can't do it by dragging. But, you can save to an mbox file with ctrl + s. Opera doesn't support saving to an .eml file. In common cases though, you can edit the mbox file with a text editor and change it to an .eml file if you really want an .eml format. But, if you're using Opera everywhere, an mbox file will be fine.

Originally posted by frmo:

I miss options to edit the way of displaying a window where an e-mail is seem. I would like not to have to stick to a window that is always a tab. One option should allow me to make it float on the screen and place it wherever one wants. I understand that an extra Opera window can be created by dragging the tab onto the desktop but it's not quite the same.

You can open the message in a new tab, right-click on the tab, goto arrange and click "restore". Then, it's like its own little floating window.

Originally posted by frmo:

Regarding importing contacts: I did it using csv and then used converter available online which was pointed out in an earlier post in this forum. That was done but, despite several attempts, the converter still got confused with many of my contacts and I ended up editing some 50 out of the 240 contacts by hand. Some of them appeared with the names duplicated. I tried to see the cause of that but could not identify. Nevertheless, that was bearable.

OE's abook csv exporter has bugs (it doesn't adhere to the same csv format that it can import) and can produce broken csv files. In some cases, converters just can't do anything about it. Remember that OE is ancient. But, with the hallvord.com converter, it doesn't handle values that are quoted and span multiple lines. It might not handle commas inside quotes yet either. The other converter I mentioned before does though.

Originally posted by frmo:

It lacks several fields available in OE for the contacts, which is bearable though.

True, each client supports a different set a fields. Perhaps Opera will use something more standard like vCard or something in the future.

Originally posted by frmo:

I decided not to import the messages and start Opera e-mail client from scratch.

Always a nice way to do it.

Originally posted by frmo:

Saddly, I really cannot use Oper e-mail client if it does not warn me of receipts and does not let me ask for them.

That's cool. Use whatever fits you best. I like Sylpheed myself. But, I forget if it has receipt support or not.'

Originally posted by frmo:

will give a try to Thundebird

Thunderbird's pretty good. I could list lots of pros and cons about it. But, I leave that up to you to discover.

Thank you for the detailed replies. Indeed, opening a new tab for a message and clicking "restore" does the job I was commenting on.

It's indeed annoying that feature of "automatic composing" when we double click a message just to have a look at it. That should be revised my the Opera team.

Again: online spell checking is amazing, though a feature that comes with the Opera Browser (an excellent product) itself and not something specific to the email client itself.

I could live with Opera e-mail client if it was not for the lack of receipt requests support.
When coming into Windows 7 and having to select a browser + e-mail client (given the pressures Microsoft suffered to take them out of the OS) I wanted to give a try to the Opera Browser as it has so many good reviews and is a European product which I would like to support. I'll stick to the browser but cannot use the mail client. Hopefully in the future Opera will support receipt requests, much used nowadays, at least in my experience with several institutions as I tried to describe in the previous post (and even used amid friends).

Congrats for the very good support Opera puts into these forums.

hello everybody
personally i would like a receipt system like the one in outlook that i use at work. since i am using a netbook also for work i would like to know when my mail is delivered, and opened,maybe i ask too much? i must keep things simple so i have decided to use opera browser and mail for the time being at least. apart from the missing reciept feature. i find it easier to use than thunderbird, mulberry etc that i have all tried since i have installed win7 on my office and home machines. none are really up to par even with the old outlook express installed on my old xp machines. that's my 2 cent's worth.
i have office 2003 with outlook and office 2007 without outlook i would like to try word 2007 with outlook 2003. no way uncle bill will make me buy outlook 2007
ciao
frank

i have since manged to install outlook 2003 along with office 2007 which is really to demanding of a netbook personally i would prefer operamail with receipt enabled. please include the receipt in future releases, and operamail would be perfect for a netbook
ciao
frank