Anigozanthos

It's the end of an era. When Opera 7 was released way back at the beginning of 2003, included was the brand-new M2 mail client. The big feature was filters, where you could create multiple views of your inbox. This was a unique feature not seen in other email clients.

I initially found M2 "good enough". Later on Opera added IMAP and RSS newsfeed support. These were all useful. I also really liked how it automatically segregated my various mailing lists.

However, there was a continual stream of glitches. Emails might go missing, only to later return. Some filters might indicate unread messages but not show any. Messages might suddenly appear in folders they shouldn't, eg newfeeds in a mail folder, or newgroup messages mixed in with feeds.

I've also peeked into the actual mail store on my hard drive. I've found countless zero-length files and empty folders. In fact, I have more folders in my mail store than I have files!

The whole system just feels flakey. It did to begin with, but that was OK because it was so new. It's now more than five years old and nothing has changed!

I'm currently in the process of moving my computing life from a desktop PC to a laptop. It's been good to clear old things out, update applications, etc. My current task is clearing out my old emails. My plan was to export messages by account and year into MBOX files. In so doing, I've bumped into a whole slew of new M2 glitches. I'm finding emails appearing in triplicate. Emails appearing in Received but nowhere else (i.e. not associated with any email account). After the upgrade from 9.27 I even acquired a new "ghost" account with no emails in it that only appears in the panel, but doesn't show up in any of the other account configurations.

I'm also getting regular IMAP connection errors that I never got before.

I've tried exporting from Received, but all I get is:

The requested operation could not be completed because one or more of the selected messages did not have a locally downloaded body. Opera will now try to download the missing message bodies.

Nothing happens - Opera doesn't download anything. In fact I don't believe anything that message is telling me! Except for the "not completed" part, that is.

I had no idea Opera would make it so difficult for me to export my emails. I've actually got more than seven years of emails to sort out because I imported all my existing messages when I switched to M2. I expect I'm going to spent many hours, if not days, trying to sort out this colossal mess!

What I'm doing is trying to pick out messages from Received and dragging them into temporary IMAP folders. The problem is Received then shows duplicate messages (the original and the newly dragged message). I can't use account filters to try to categorise messages because then the IMAP folder I want to drag to no longer shows. Once they're in the IMAP folder I export from there to an MBOX file, which I then import into Thunderbird where I can merge them into a single huge MBOX file (much bigger than the limited storage available in my IMAP account).

Once I've collected all my messages into the various MBOX files, I can zip and archive them. To view them, I've found a really nice freebie called Mail Store Home. It can import mail from various sources, including MBOX files, and can sort and search your messages very quickly. I've also found MBOX Viewer, which doesn't need installing and directly reads MBOX files, but it's very primitive - searching doesn't seem to work and there's no provision for sorting. I'm currently investigating a Perl script called mailsort that sounds like it might be able to put my MBOX-es in order.

Since I've switched to IMAP, it's now a trivial exercise to switch between mail clients. My laptop came with MS Office, so my plan now is to switch to MS Outlook. I think I've given M2 plenty of time. I'm now just tired of the never-ending procession of glitches, bugs and missing features. It's time to move on.