Opera: mail evolution

Today, a regular press release from Opera Software announced that the Norwegian browser developer has acquired another company - the Australian email service FastMail , which has been on the market for almost 10 years. This acquisition, in general, is easily explained - Opera acquired its own mail service. Thus, in the near future we can expect some (perhaps quite deep) changes in terms of expanding the mail functions of the popular browser.

In fact, old-timers may recall that Opera Software had its own mail service - Operamail appeared in 2000, which was available for free use in the web interface mode, and on a paid basis, as a basic service for the Opera Mail mail client built into the Opera browser (which at that time existed under the name M2). Moreover, it still works, but its functionality has remained at the level of a decade ago, which was the reason for its gradual extinction and turning into a kind of atavism.

But now it has been replaced by a rather powerful in terms of functionality and well-established FastMail - according to the plans of opera developers, existing Operamail accounts smoothly migrate to a new engine, gaining a new life. However, this also cannot be called a significant event - well, the engine has changed. So what?

In fact, much more interesting thoughts come to mind after readingcurrent features of FastMail . A brief list of the most interesting features looks like this:

- Support for working with mobile phones;
- Mail protection through temporary SMS passwords;
- Work with shared folders and files;
- instant messaging;
- Web directories for photos and other files;

At a high level and technical side:

- Support for IMAP / POP / SMTP protocols;
- Access to the address book via LDAP;
- Support for WAP;
- Support FTP / DAV;
- Support for XMPP / Jabber;
- Support for sending SMS via SMTP;

And much more.

Well, with a fair amount of certainty, we can say that Opera users will see a full-fledged email service on mobile devices (both in Opera Mobile and Opera Mini), as well as an extension of the existing Opera Mail features on the desktop. What innovations these will be - time will tell. One thing is for sure: Opera Software is step by step implementing its plans to provide full Internet access to the owners of any devices with access to the global network.