Just in case someone might be intersested (fat chance!) I thought I would expose myself to what I just did.

Ike most here I bewail the passing of opera­mail, for all the reasons that have come up ranging from nostalgia to the pure hassle of changing. Plus the irritation of being forced to do something.

Becasue of a misunderstanding of how long I actually had to do something, I thought that all had to be sorted this month because I had downloaded part of the on-cloud email archive to see what arrived in my computer. Well, I don't know it that was actually correct but the result wwas that looked at “solutions” and came to the conclusion that I couldn't come to a conclusion and so started to look at what I had to do it the end of the moth was a real deadline.

Enter Panic, left, right and centre!

In the course of that I discovered that Fastmail actually make it rather easy to recover the basics (emails you want to keep, email addresses etc, although copying / resending / printing as {Dfs email is a genuine hassle. What was difficult was deciding who needed to be told what the new email would be, with the inevitable conclusion being that one transfer being enough, one would have to get it right first time if one left precipitously.

support@fastmail.com were very useful and pointed me towards a solution which has turned out to be very simple to achieve. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to set it up and more r than 10 I think. There are several domains to choose from.

My email address was xyz@operamail.com (not xyz of course but my 3 initials – a conceit I know, but why not!?)
I renamed my identity, changing the domain at the same time, to xyz@fastmail.co.uk), using a very natty facility in Fastmail, which, at the same time automatically added xyz@operamail as an alias meaning that this would be transparent to people wanting to send me emails, or replying to them). One can add a footer which advise on any new email address one might chose, including the renamed one.

I'm pleased with that choice, even though it is but step 1 of the process because:

o It takes the time pressure hassle away and I can chose the transfer date when I'm ready
o It thereby increases the time pressure of making a decision on what comes next
o I can prepare in parallel some of the transfer work
o I can spread the change announcement over a controlled period; first the top priority and second, because the incoming will still reach me as I would plan an overlap between loosing opera-mail and the new one becoming functional.
o In principle I won't have to move twice
o It uses the existing subscription
o I get to keep the front end of my ID

Al the a pretty obvious but added up I think it's a good choice.

One thing to come out of it so far ia that Fastmail is pretty good and finding a Mail client as good as that will be tricky. By now I'm comfortable using Fastmail and might stay there. The above process protects that as a choice, rather the leaving becoming a fait accomplit.

I looked at Google – clunky I would say
also at Outlook – also a bit clunky but in a more sophisticated way
Of course that may be lack of familiarity particularly with Outlook, but that's my impression so far.
I tried to look at Vivaldi Mail but having sort of registered my new ID it would not let me complete the process , so work in progress there.

I've not looked at Thunderbird

Well there we are, not for everyone perhaps, but not a bad staging post which eases one into the migration.

@alphaville --- That was good info ---. many thanks. I shall examine if I transgressed there!

Actually I had ruled Outlook out because of what I thought was an incompatility which was partly a pity because I had hoped to use it having recently installed Office 360 and thought Outlook would be good to try. That choice is still tenuously hovering there although I have doubts about continuing with Office 360 because of their blocking tactics on other software I have tended to use like Open Office. But that's another story.

But chance, however, I became aware of an odd-ball alternative. Cambridge University supports a rather exclusive Mail System for ex postdocs. I qualify because I got doctored there many many years ago.. The domain is something like Cantab.net . At the moment I'm hung up ressurecting by alumni number in order to register It caught my eye since it is a "lifetime email address", although that is probably just for the free subscription part (100mb), not the subscription one at 4Gb storage.

Anyway, the reason for mentioning that is to suggest that alumni mail addresses are surely not just a Cambridge thing and if one has a sentimental fondness for one's Alma Mater, like I do, then it is worth looking at: A bit if "cachet" involved too.

This mail-change thing forces one to think out of the box - all part of the fun I suppose.

Yes you are right, the phrase "flogging a dead horse" does come to mind.

By the way I tried Outlook but discovered it was in some way incompatible with coexisting with fastmail security , so the change-over period would have been over-complex.

In the end I did a huge cleaning and have a good setup in a new account at Fastmail, for my same 3 digit person.

Whimsically, I thought I would have an alias called "me" so I could send test emails to myself (which one does sometimes to try out new things). It could not accept "me" as an alias (presumably already taken) so I created an alias called "myself" and that works,

In the end, the only way you can make sense of bad things is to have fun with them.

Cheers

Have you checked out the availability of a 2 digit user name on Fastmail, They reorganised their email structure recently and for a while at east there were some options of that type available - ask their support.

2 or so weeks ago I renamed my 3 digit account in Operamail to one in fastmail, under the domain fastmail.co.uk, so I'm happy in that respect.

See if you can do that, but soon - it is first come first served in this situation.

It's worth trying, although they may be out of 2 digit options now, but don't delay.

Well I have some further thoughts on this Email Migration conundrum and can say what my conclusions are.

The bottom line is that I am staying with Fastmail for a while and may well make that long term.

I set up a new Account on Fastmail which is of the type xyz@fastmail.co.uk (other countries are available) and that is working well. In the main I use as email just the now-alias identity xyz@operamail.com which Fastmail set up for you which is very easy to use and puts emails directly in your new Fastmail account. The Fastmail help people were great, even with my blundering.

At first I thought I would try out the process of migration to another account, transferring the emails as I went along, using my Gmail account as the target and copying emails out to there. It was a disaster because I was approaching it from a piecemeal viewpoint and saw myself collapsing in a welter of lost and/or duplicated emails.

So I decided to inform as priority those contacts whose emails I would like to know about first like Medical stuff, Banks, key shops and other financial things; in general those that I register with but do not normally write to but who send emails which MUST go to the right place.The rest can be worked through; for them operamail is still working, but they and even close friends can wait.

A necessary trick is to have a good checksheet and keep count. Memory only lasts to the next email.

I've taken the opportunity to reduce my inbox to manageable levels (Over 2000 to less than 10) and tidy up my folder logic. In this I was lucky to discover the Fastmail App (Which is very good indeed) so that I could sort out a lot of that while watching the latest version of my Netflix serial in the comfort of my sofa and a glass of wine

If I do decide to change to a different Email service I now know that a lot of the transfer work can be done very easily and the experience I'm getting in informing contacts will be invaluable.

But I've bought myself time to take that decision, and I have to say that Fastmail is actually rather good.

Cheers

Just in case someone might be intersested (fat chance!) I thought I would expose myself to what I just did.

Ike most here I bewail the passing of opera­mail, for all the reasons that have come up ranging from nostalgia to the pure hassle of changing. Plus the irritation of being forced to do something.

Becasue of a misunderstanding of how long I actually had to do something, I thought that all had to be sorted this month because I had downloaded part of the on-cloud email archive to see what arrived in my computer. Well, I don't know it that was actually correct but the result wwas that looked at “solutions” and came to the conclusion that I couldn't come to a conclusion and so started to look at what I had to do it the end of the moth was a real deadline.

Enter Panic, left, right and centre!

In the course of that I discovered that Fastmail actually make it rather easy to recover the basics (emails you want to keep, email addresses etc, although copying / resending / printing as {Dfs email is a genuine hassle. What was difficult was deciding who needed to be told what the new email would be, with the inevitable conclusion being that one transfer being enough, one would have to get it right first time if one left precipitously.

support@fastmail.com were very useful and pointed me towards a solution which has turned out to be very simple to achieve. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to set it up and more r than 10 I think. There are several domains to choose from.

My email address was xyz@operamail.com (not xyz of course but my 3 initials – a conceit I know, but why not!?)
I renamed my identity, changing the domain at the same time, to xyz@fastmail.co.uk), using a very natty facility in Fastmail, which, at the same time automatically added xyz@operamail as an alias meaning that this would be transparent to people wanting to send me emails, or replying to them). One can add a footer which advise on any new email address one might chose, including the renamed one.

I'm pleased with that choice, even though it is but step 1 of the process because:

o It takes the time pressure hassle away and I can chose the transfer date when I'm ready
o It thereby increases the time pressure of making a decision on what comes next
o I can prepare in parallel some of the transfer work
o I can spread the change announcement over a controlled period; first the top priority and second, because the incoming will still reach me as I would plan an overlap between loosing opera-mail and the new one becoming functional.
o In principle I won't have to move twice
o It uses the existing subscription
o I get to keep the front end of my ID

Al the a pretty obvious but added up I think it's a good choice.

One thing to come out of it so far ia that Fastmail is pretty good and finding a Mail client as good as that will be tricky. By now I'm comfortable using Fastmail and might stay there. The above process protects that as a choice, rather the leaving becoming a fait accomplit.

I looked at Google – clunky I would say
also at Outlook – also a bit clunky but in a more sophisticated way
Of course that may be lack of familiarity particularly with Outlook, but that's my impression so far.
I tried to look at Vivaldi Mail but having sort of registered my new ID it would not let me complete the process , so work in progress there.

I've not looked at Thunderbird

Well there we are, not for everyone perhaps, but not a bad staging post which eases one into the migration.

@wayner46 Glad to hear you'll soon be "maxing out" on the jabs. It's a nice feeling when it's done.

I'm not really getting anywhere with my search for a new "email base". In the course of that I looked at the MS 365 Personal Offer, not that it provides an email but it does come with a usable slice of Cloud Storage. But on checking the situation should I fall off my perch and my wife had to access the data I had stored there, I found the MS are less than obliging on that front and apply extreme fussiness to releasing data which she must have. That means that MS 365 is at risky and messy. I haven't looked yet but I presume that will apply to Outlook as well, being in the MS Stable.

Now my Operamail has stopped receiving email; it is not my week!

@boonstra - Thanks for the remark, but it's not clear what you'ere getting at.

@wayner46 said in Operamail future?:

@string

Nice words James

Those were the days!

I'm so old now I've had 2 Jabs of Vaccine!

I only found about this matter yesterday (17th April); maybe the earlier announcements were indeed feelers. It knocks my otherwise good impressions of Fastmail.

I too have used Operational from its very beginning, when one could still get 3 letter user names so I flattered myself by using my own initials. That would be a further rational for wanting to keep my email address as is, but not enough to surmount the Chinese connection which to me and many is synonymous with a disregard for ethical behaviour, and a Trojan Horse to boot

Current moderators excepted of course.

So, what with the remarks so far in this thread, I have also come to the conclusion that there is no option but to change my email address from Operamail and face the hassle of re-registering a multitude of registrations. That should keep me busy until my present Fastmail subscription runs out next Feb.

But of course before doing that I have to choose which new email to have since I don't want to do things twice so the opinions here have been useful.

I like the Fastmail software but concerned (about how stable that will be, I signed up to the Vivaldi Mail today and need to check that out - it looks promising, Gmail I have already but find it clunky and there may be others. But I suspect that of these Vivaldi will win out.

I stopped using Opera Mail some time ago. Looking at it now and then to see if had to become attractive to me. The reasons I left Opera were: the loss of the Vital need to have a proper bookmarking capability, the Forum cancellation, and of course the loss of the email capability. Now I would add the Chinese Dragon lurking in the background. Any one of those would have been enough reason to go. Its Mail capability was the original reason I took it up in the first place.

Naturally I followed what was happening with Vivaldi and Otter; I also used the DnD Discussion Forum https://thedndsanctuary.eu which is worth visiting -old timers will find some familiar folk there .... especially if we all get shunted off for looking away from Opera.

Anyway, Browser-wise Vivaldi matured first and their Bookmark system was OK (and improving but not yet perfect and I agree with the remark that it needs some further "maturing" - but it has been improving in that regard. Now they add a Mail Client of some sort and the result may very well succeed..

Alternatively MS Outlook, not something I've used at all, but maybe allied to my existing gmail could function with some stability.

We shall see.

Hope this is the right place for this. I offer the usual applies if I miss something from another post.

It is about the news portion of the browser.

So on the news part of the beta ---
I'm one of those who are sensitive to bandwidth: I do a lot of roaming and this can be expensive in foreign parts if one is not careful. I try not to use my personal bandwidth on phone or tablet and always use a free WiFi cafe for my daily dose of downloaded digital newspapers.

So my preference is to download things just the one time and then have an offline copy to come back to during the day. Otherwise, for me, the news feed would always be off except at home with my tame WiFi.

So from that perspective I'd like to be able to download news items for offline reading and disable any background activity from the news function. Naturally that would need a means to delete the download.

Also I note that the same control in settings turns off both news and notifications. Maybe this is a terminology thing about the meaning of notifications, but it would be good if those two commands could face separate controls.