Re: Triggers and Administrivia (was Re: Fwd: Re: One And A Half)

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:04:13 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> (Paul B:)
>> If you don't like your email program, get a new one. There are myriad
>> alternatives. Personally, I use M2, the mail client that is part of the
>> Opera web browser http://www.opera.com/
>
> Is it free? How would adopting Opera mesh with my current system-- along
> with Verizon DSL, I get msn.com email for free.  Generally it displays
> Unicode OK, but I have yet to figure out how to send in Unicode (as if I
> wanted to)...
There are two versions of Opera, one free and one non-free. The free
version includes a random banner ad, but they're quite non-invasive and
are tucked away in the far top-right corner, in an area neither my eyes
nor my mouse tend to go. I'm capable of using the free version without
getting distracted. The non-free version has no such banner ad.

To use it for email, you need to have POP/SMTP servers (instead of using a
web page) to get to your email. I'm assuming MSN does that, but I can't
promise it. Once you know the server names, the setup screens in Opera are
really simple and self-explanatory. You'll spend more time selecting the
fonts to use than setting up email, or at least you will if you're like me.

Opera is a combined browser, mail program and newsgroups program, so you
can get at just about everything most people do every day through one
unified interface. I think it's an IRC program, as well, but I've never
used that part of it.

It has its own pop-up blocker, custom cookie controls, and is not subject
to the same attacks as Internet Explorer. On Linux, you may have trouble
with Java and Flash, but on Windows I've never had any problems.

It is compatible with Windows foreign language keyboards, and of course
you can paste Unicode text from the clipboard, meaning you can compose in
Word, or Character Map, or anything else that takes your fancy. The
default outgoing character encoding is ISO 8859-15, which is fairly
comprehensive, but it's a matter of a couple of mouse clicks to set it to
UTF-8. What bugs me is that it can read but not post in UTF-7, and UTF-7
gets around the Unicode-mangling problems with this listserver.




Paul