Google Reader is closing down. I’m going for Opera Mail

We have around one more week for the closing down of Google Reader. It was a handy service to follow the interesting blogs and other websites – all in one place. Since google decided to ditch one of my useful tools I was looking for alternatives. I knew Thunderbird facilitates RSS reading and so many other mail clients. Also there are other online alternatives that are equivalent to Google Reader. However this time I decided to go for a desktop client.

Keeping E-mails and RSS together was my intention. And also I really needed a decent alternative for Mac’s native Mail application. It is slow and not very appealing.

Opera browser had RSS reader sometime back and now no more with the browser. However Opera has the ‘Opera Mail’ desktop client software for Mac and Windows that includes an RSS reader. I thought of giving it a try so now I’ve installed the Mac version and configured my email that uses the Google’s mail servers.

Opera Mail
Opera Mail Client

I choose to use the IMAP rather than POP. Therefore the configuration looks like this.

e-mail configuration

 

I’m putting this together here because I can keep this as a reference to the port numbers. 😉 If you want to use POP – the port number is 995.

Now it’s time to configure the RSS feeds of my favorite blogs and websites. For example I choose Peteris Krumins’ Blog. In the Opera Mail, go to the menu item ‘Feeds -> Manage Feeds’. It will bring up the ‘Subscribe to Feeds’ dialog – click on the ‘Add’ button and provide RSS feed URL.

RSS Configuration

That was all it required to get going and I’m happy with Opera Mail for now. It is fast and intuitive. Let me see how far I can go with this.

If you are looking for some other alternatives you can find them here:

Make Tech Easier blog page: http://bit.ly/19w0i5F (Mac only)