Removing Clients

Editing the "opera.ini" file

If you want to remove one or more of these components from the user interface, you should exit Opera and add the following lines to the "opera.ini" file:

[USER PREFS]
Show News Client=0
Show IM Client=0
Show E-mail Client=0

The value "0" hides the client, "1" shows it.

This file can be found in your Opera directory, "C:\Program files\Opera" by default. If you are not sure where Opera is located on your computer, open the "about Opera" window. Note that you can only edit the "opera.ini" file when Opera is not running.

When the e-mail client is hidden, both the menu entry for e-mail and the tab for e-mail in the Hotlist window are removed. Hiding the news client and the IM client removes their entries from the menu. When you remove both the e-mail client and the IM client, the "Contacts" tab is also removed from the Hotlist window.

Removing the e-mail module

All code related to sending and receiving e-mail, and managing the e-mail folders, is contained in a module. You can remove the file that contains the e-mail module, "omail32.dll"; this saves some bytes on your hard disk and permanently removes the possibility to use Opera as a mailer. If you only want to try this, you can rename this file or move it to another directory, instead of removing it completely from your system.

Removing the e-mail module has the same effect on the user interface as adding the line "Show E-mail Client=0" to the "USER PREFS" section of "opera.ini", except that the menu entry "E-mail" isn't removed. To remedy this, also add the line to "opera.ini" as explained above.

Removing the e-mail module will not harm your existing Opera mail folders as long as they remain on your hard disk; add the e-mail module again and they become available.

Issues

The news client uses the e-mail module for composing news articles. If you either remove the module or disable the e-mail client in "opera.ini" as described above, you will not be able to post newsgroup articles. The buttons for composing new articles and replies are also removed from the newsgroup toolbar. However, you can still read newsgroups.

Removing the clients from the user interface does not necessarily remove all functionality of the IM and newsgroup clients:

News

If you enter a URL for a news server, newsgroup, or news article, Opera will open a fully functional news window; there's no way to prevent this

Messaging

Using keyboard shortcuts to connect to an IM server will produce a dialog asking you to set up an IM account (even when there's an "im.ini" file available); an attempt to do so may crash Opera

E-mail

No issues; you can't send nor read mails anymore, and mailto-links open the system default e-mail client as specified in your preferences

Some other problems you might encounter:

• Removing the e-mail client removes the functionality of the [Tab] key in the Hotlist
• If you use a keyboard shortcut to activate a Hotlist pane that doesn't exist anymore, the currently active pane will become blank; you need to click on another tab in the Hotlist to regain the one you lost