Opera: postal evolution

Today, another press release from Opera Software announced that the Norwegian browser developer has acquired another company - the Australian mail 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 e-mail service - in 2000, Operamail appeared, which was available for free use in the web-interface mode, and on a paid basis, as a basic service for Opera’s mail browser. Opera Mail client (at that time existing under the name M2). Moreover, it still works, but its functionality remained at the level of ten years ago, which was the reason for its gradual extinction and transformation into a kind of atavism.

But now it has been replaced by quite powerful in terms of functionality and well-proven FastMail - according to the plans of opera developers, existing Operamail accounts smoothly migrate to the new engine, getting a new life. However, this is also not a significant event - well, the engine has changed. What from that?
')
In fact, much more interesting thoughts come to mind after becoming familiar with the current capabilities of FastMail . In short, the list of the most interesting functions looks like this:

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

On a high level and technical side:

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

And much more.

Well, with enough confidence we can say that Opera users are waiting for the emergence of a full-fledged email service on mobile devices (both in Opera Mobile and Opera Mini), as well as expanding the existing features of Opera Mail on the desktop. What innovations will be - time will tell. One thing is for sure: Opera Software, step by step, implements its plans to provide a full-fledged Internet to the owners of any devices that have access to the worldwide network.