I installed Opera mail a month or two ago, having previously tried Mail.app and Thunderbird on the Mac, and before that many years of Outlook use on Windows. Using Outlook was smooth due to years of experience and I never minded using Outlook. Since getting a Mac however, with each email application, my annoyance has been mounting the longer I use the application. Opera is worth describing despite its quick annoyance load and I wish I could continue to live with it because it has the potential to increase one's efficiency reading and using email.

Overall model: Facets

Opera doesn't encourage hierarchical sorting of email into IMAP folders. It will handle the IMAP folders that exist for your account on the server albeit not too well -- it doesn't necessarily synch them all for offline use which I find impossible to live with.

Instead, Opera encourages navigation by facets, followed by view filtering.

Facets:

• Email app categories: Received/Sent/Drafts/Spam/Trash
• Contacts
• Thread
• Label (fixed list): Important/Todo/Mail back/Call back/Meeting/Funny/Valuable
• Attachments
• Mailing lists
• Custom filters

Personally, I've never used the attachments or thread facets, but I quite appreciate the contacts and mailing lists facets. If somebody is already a contact and I'm looking from an email from that person, this is the best way to find it -- open the contacts list, find the person, start browsing or filtering the complete list of emails from that person, whether in my inbox or elsewhere. It also includes emails I sent to that person, cool. Similar with mailing lists which Opera auto-detects quite successfully. One flaw with the contacts solution is that Opera doesn't seem to reliably add a new contact when I want one. Maybe it doesn't consider them "active" even if I want to see the contact.

The custom filters are quite necessary to usability if you want to filter the "unread" view at all. Each custom filter can be configured either to affect the unread view or not to. For me, I immediately set up custom filters for high-traffic but non-criticial IETF mailing lists and excluded emails matching those filters from my unread view. I only browse through those unread mails when I specifically have nothing better to do. That leaves my unread view as a pretty good "todo" list if I want to use it that way, or as true GTD-style inbox -- stuff that I haven't yet seen at all, finished reading, or decided what to do with yet.

The label list I find constraining because it's not customizable (each label comes with its own icon which appears with the email everywhere). At least labels are easy to apply with a special column and drop-down value selector. I labeled a few things thinking I would find them later easier if I marked them "meeting" or "todo" and then marked them as read to disappear them from my default view -- but I don't do this consistently enough to have had that provide refind value for me.

Note that all the facets are listed separately in the sidebar with open/close widgets so that I can see my whole list of contacts or close them up and just see "Contacts". Because of the nature of summary views which naturally contain to/from and in OPera contain label, it's sometimes possible to reasonably easily cross two facets. Some examples:

• To find an email that Bernard sent to the CalDAV mailing list, I can open the mailing list facet, find the correct mailing list, then click on the From column to sort, then find Bernard.
• To find an email from Katie that I considered important, I can open the contact facet, click on Katie, then sort the view by Label.

Views

Opera views are pretty powerful and I clearly haven't learned to use the full power yet. E.g. you can quickly update the period being viewed to show "this week" or "this month" (though not previous weeks or months).

When I'm viewing a contact's email I can quickly toggle the view to show "To" or "From" instead of the default "To and from".

Note that read/unread isn't considered a facet the same way the others are. The "Unread" view is special/magic and appears at the top of the sidebar above all the facets. Any view -- e.g. by mailing list -- can quickly be changed to show only unread by using the view selector widget. I use that fairly frequently.

Using Opera with GTD

The "Getting Things Done" model can work pretty well with Opera -- slightly better than with other email clients, in my experience so far.

One of the things you want to do for GTD is to clear your inboxes. That's particularly important for email. You want to methodically evaluate incoming emails and decide if there's something you want to do later. If there's not, Opera allows you to simply hit 'k' on the keyboard or use the toolbar "Mark Read" button for the email to go away.

Taking immediate action is also easy, e.g. reply or follow up on a Web link.

If there is something to do later, this is where things generally get hairy. If I was going to use Opera+GTD rigorously, I would use the "ToDo" and "mail back" and "call back" labels then mark something as unread -- but for me, my GTD task list doesn't live in Opera, it lives in iOrganize. Do I add a task to my iOrganize file to refer to the email? If so, then at least using a label would help me find it quickly when I get to the task. The email was marked as "read" when I filed it for later action but I can go to the "Todo" facet quickly and see all those I marked. After completing the action I can remove the "Todo" label.

Another option would be to use Opera itself to maintain my GTD context lists or at least some of them. The task list for "emails to read" and "emails to send" can easily live entirely in Opera -- to create a marker for an email to send later you can just create a draft and leave it there. However, other categories of GTD todo lists aren't easy to keep entirely in one place so it would probably break down. For example, although some "calls to make" are triggered by incoming emails, others aren't -- and if I tried to use the Opera list of emails with the "Call Back" label set as part of my list of calls to make, I'd be forced to keep a second list elsewhere with the other calls. Keeping two lists of calls to make starts to cause the GTD system to break down.

There doesn't seem to be a way to create non-email items that appear in views together with emails. There's a bizarre Note feature but they live on their own nearly entirely segregated from mail.

Opera doesn't have ticklers or tasks.

Reasons for quitting

Poor IMAP folder support: For better or for worse, most of my extensive email archive is already sorted into a few levels of hierarchy. The top level is very stable (work, ietf, personal) and the lower levels make enough sense that I only need to reorganize emails and folders periodically and rarely. But when I'm trying to find an email from a year ago and I know very well I would have sorted it into the ietf.apparea.lemonade folder, I find using Opera too frustrating. I can't find the email at all if I'm offline, and if I'm online I have to navigate through the flat list of IMAP folders that Opera provides at the very bottom of the sidebar. There was also an annoying initial setup glitch where it found all of my IMAP folders twice -- e.g. once as ietf.apparea and once as INBOX.ietf.apparea. One set of IMAP folders is broken, the other has the annoying INBOX prefix making the names super long. I haven't managed to clean out the broken folders yet because it's annoying to manually "unsubscribe" each one. Wierd.

Built-in browser bias: If it's important to you to have an integrated email and Web browser, this might be a feature rather than a bug for you. However I prefer to use Firefox and Opera wouldn't launch links into Firefox for me.

Frustrating synch problems:

• Inability to consistenly remember that I've marked an email as "read" and remove it from my "unread" view is super annoying. Sometimes when it resynchs it remarks some emails as unread.
• Sometimes it shows an email as read but it still shows in the unread view and I'm still able to use the "Mark as read" toolbar button. Ick!
• Opera sometimes get stuck synching and for a long time I might not notice I'm not getting new mail. Doesn't reset manually very well either -- the GUI affordance they provide for "stop" and start synching again doesn't work!
• Doesn't reliably synch the bodies of emails. I hate having only the header of an email I want to read.

Buggy threading view: As long as the threading view exists, I like using it particularly to see mailing list traffic. However it has trouble marking threads as read or unread and deleting threads.

Visual annoyances: After downloading the body of an email, Opera first displays it, then blanks the body, then displays it again. Ick!

Other notes

• I don't use Opera Notes or Bookmarks.

• Nice feature: It remembers exactly where I was between quits and restarts! Exactly!

• It has a "quick reply" box at the bottom which I sometimes use... it quickly opens up to a full reply which was not what I initially expected.

• Unusually, Opera doesn't have incoming mail sorting rules the same way that other clients do. You just can't set it up to sort mail from Foo into IMAP folder Bar because it's not intended to be used that way -- it wants to treat the whole set of mail as a soup. I didn't miss that lack of functionality as long as I was willing to handle email The Opera Way.