Labs

Whether you find the built-in mail client included in Opera's browser as "revolutionary" as its makers suggest will depend on the mail system you're currently using. If you've previously been using Outlook Express, the web page-style format will be quite a departure. If, on the other hand, you've been accessing email on the web using your browser, it's more of the same, only this time the mail that's managed in Opera's slick-looking web interface is all stored on your computer.

Setting up accounts is easy. If you're using a well-known webmail account, Opera automatically provides the server names for POP3 and SMTP servers and selects the correct ports to transmit on. For other hosts, it inserts its best guess and leaves you to edit them as part of the setup wizard. Like Pegasus, Opera took a long time to find and download messages from our POP3 server. Unlike Pegasus, it let us look at mail as soon as it had been downloaded. Also good is a pop-up alert that appears above the System Tray to alert you to new mail.

The complete Opera program, which consists of a fast, slimline browser, newsreader and

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mail client, is less than 4MB in size, so it's surprising that any one of its components can do as much as it does. Compared to the other dedicated email programs on test, Opera's software looks a bit scant. Its fancy graphical interface stretches to giving you brightly coloured icons with which to label your messages, but the saved search facility doesn't include Thunderbird's handy facility for continually updating the virtual search folder with new matches. In keeping with the web style of its interface, one trick that Opera does have up its sleeve is a range of context menu options when you right-click a message or folder.

Spam filtering in Opera is clunky at first and the default Medium setting resulted in a large number of spam messages getting through, while the Strong option led to an uncomfortable number of false positives. The filter can be supplemented with rules to include or exclude messages containing specific phrases. The system learns using Bayesian filtering, spotting patterns in the messages that are manually included in or excluded from the Spam folder.

While Opera is no match for the technical sophistication of Pegasus or the clean interface offered by Thunderbird, it's incredibly handy to be able to flick from web browsing to email and back within a single application, simply by clicking on the relevant browser tabs.

The security offered by Opera isn't as good as some other programs. For instance, it doesn't support message encryption. However, if the convenience of being able to hop between a browser and an email client really appeals to you, and you were thinking of ditching Internet Explorer anyway, this is a good choice to cope with day-to-day tasks.