So you don’t have Internet in your home pc. But you have subscribed to those wonderful daily tutorials on web design by email. Now you find that you don’t have time to read all those mails because you have internet access through Office, Browsing centers, College, etc. You can’t read your mails leisurely at these places.

The Problem: Unable to read emails at your leisure.

The Solution:

1) Get yourself a Pen drive/Thumb Drive/USB Drive/Portable HDD first.

2) Then download the software “Opera 9 USB” from:

http://opera-usb.com/download/opera925en.zip

It’s not the regular Opera package, that is you don’t need to install it to work. The download would be around 5 MB. Download it, it’s a Gift for you.

3) Extract the contents of the download to your Pen Drive. Neatly rename the folder to something like “Opera”. So if you open the folder you just have to double click “operausb.exe” to start your internet session.

4) Consider you have gmail account. To save those mails, first create an offline account in Opera. To do it, click through “Tools” at the top and click “Mail and chat accounts…” and set up a Regular POP email account by following On screen instructions and put your login details. For a gmail account put the following data in respective fields:
Incoming server: pop.gmail.com
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com.
Actually it detects automatically. I request viewers of this article to post the servers for other providers.

5) Once done, it will automatically start downloading emails to your pen drive. You can see “Mail” tab at the left panel. If not enable it by going through “Tools” > “Appearance” > “Panels” and checking the “Mail” checkbox. You can also set the Placement of the panel present slightly below.
So when you return to internet next day, you just have to insert your pen drive and open Opera. That’ it. You don’t even have to enter the login details.

The Downside:

1) This may actually NOT appear as a downside for you. I tried with gmail, and saw that messages in spam folder don’t get downloaded. This is even good, who wants to read those trillions of spam???

2) Some images which reside on senders server are not downloaded. When I tried it out, out of 46 emails containing images, 7 of them didn’t had those images downloaded. But the text will be downloaded whatever may be the case.

Extra Information:

You can also set an IMAP account in Opera. So that if you delete an email in Opera it automatically gets deleted in your mails server. I don’t recommend this for offline users.

Somewhat similar to Thunderbird as a Portable Application... although I do not recommend storing your emails on a thumb Drive for security reasons.

Yes, similar to Thunderbird, but my reason for recommending Opera was, that we can surf, bookmark, email with just one application. It is essential for any portable internet user.

And as long as we can keep our USB safe there are no security threats. It is safer than the installed applications as nothing is stored in the computer. But keyloggers are another thing...

I'm using the Opera USB stored on my Pendrive to browse from Public Internet Cafes.

I usually copy it to the computer's harddisk before opening the Opera as this will reduce the total number of read and write requests made to the Pendrive, thus enhancing the drive's life and increases performance. After the browsing is complted I'll move the folder back to the pendrive.



You can protect your passwords by using the Opera's Wand to store passwords. So there would be no reason to worry about keyloggers.

Yes I agree with that, Pendrive will be affected with greater number of read write requests. But coming back to security, when you copy to harddisk and delete it after the work is done, the deleted data can be easily recovered by a software like "Restoration". So, it is important that the data should be securely deleted.
And thanks for your suggestion of Wand passwords. I didn't even thought about it.