Opera and exmh

You can use the Opera (http://www.opera.com) browser to view html mail including multipart/alternative messages that have a text/html part. There are two parts to the integration:

1. Setting up the exmh Preferences
2. A simple shell script that invokes Opera
3. Set Opera to use exmh as your mail client

Setting up the exmh Preferences

In exmh click the Preferences button and then click the WWW preference button Set the following preference values

• Url Viewer: choose the netscape radio button
• Netscape Command: opera-wrapper $xuri

If the shell script opera-wrapper won't be available on the path give the full path to it in the "Netscape command" setting

A simple shell script that invokes Opera

Create a shell script named opera-wrapper. It must either be in a directory on your path or you must give the full path to it when using it(of course).

 #!/bin/sh
 /usr/bin/X11/opera -newwindow "$1" &
 exit

Set Opera to use exmh as your mail client

exmh is shipped with a file "comp.pl" (in the misc directory). Edit this file to your needs and enter in Opera in Preferences-->Applications-->Emailclient:

 path-to-your/comp.pl

that's it

Acknowledgments and Notes:

• It is not obvious why it is necessary to use a shell script to start Opera. If Opera is already running then the -newwindow option causes the new copy to communicate the desired page to the running copy and then exit. If Opera is not running, however, the newly started copy does not exit. This will cause exmh to hang at that point until you exit Opera. Using a shell script which starts Opera in the background avoids this problem.
• Opera, like Netscape, locates the "running instance" of itself by looking for a copy of Opera that is displaying on your X server. This can cause problems if you run Opera and exmh on separate systems but display on the same X server. You will only be able to view HTML mail using this method if your $EXMHTMPDIR directory is available on the same path from both systems.
• This was inspired by a number of short discussions of integrating exmh and Opera on the exmh-users mailing list in 2001. The opera-wrapper shell script is from Rick Baartman and it can be used with wvWare to View MS-Word documents in email. See [1] for the relevant mailing list messages.
• The ability to use exmh as Opera's mail client was posted to exmh-users by Juergen Vollmer