Jochen S.

Why I choose the Opera browser

This is a summary about my experience with Opera mail client.

I used it since Opera M2 came out. Nice idea to store all mails in one folder and just provide every possible view to it. I was really impressed. After a while I got a strange feeling when searching for older mails. I knew there must be an email containing a special word but couldn't find it. Because of that I had a closer eye on my mails.

Things got even stranger with every year and every update. I marked 30 mails as "important", for example. But sometimes my manual count of those mails was different from the "total" value provided for the view.

It became really interesting when I tried to update from 9.64 to 10.60. I tried but skipped the 10.x versions below because they seemed to loose mail. Be sure I tried with a test setup and kept my mail profile untouched. But then I thought I can't surf with security bugs any longer and decided to spend several hours to figure that out...

The following are true facts of one of my Opera installations, no examples!

Opera 9.64 listed
- Received "1438 total"
- Sent "976 total"
- Trash, Drafts, Sent, Spam = empty
(Backup of that profile and image of installation available, restored from them after every try-and-error)

Opera 10.6, installed into a new directory as independent. Then told it to IMPORT the mails from the 9.64 profile. Simple and secure job you will think? Well, it ended up with
- No errors during import, but
- Received "850 total" :yikes:
- Sent "398 total"
- Trash, Drafts, Sent, Spam = empty

So, Opera is not even able to import its own mail storage format? You think my mail files are completely screwed up?
Rebuilding the indexes did help nothing btw, neither in 9.64 nor in 10.6, neither if new installation or update - I tried every possible combination.

One try was to install Opera 10.6 over 9.64 as update:
- Showed not exactly the same total number of mails, and
- some mails where shown as unopened envelopes (but did show the contents when selected)

I tried to export mails from 9.64, too. That did not work: Opera complained about missing contents and tried to load them down. Of course without luck (mails from 2002, no longer on server). Interesting was that it could not even export a view or trash folder with a single mail in it, but showed the contents of all those mail without problems...

Now to the best part :D
I then tried the skript from <a href="http://www.kmkorn.de/sw/opera/en/mbs2mbx.htm" target="_blank">http://www.kmkorn.de/sw/opera/en/mbs2mbx.htm</a> on my 9.64 profile - even if the script was tested only with Opera 7.5
Guess what? I ended up with 2450 e-mails converted in 16.70 seconds without any problems! That is three more than even 9.64 told me about!

After 14 hours of investigating this, and seeing this little script doing the job without problems and on the other side several Opera versions having problems with their own data format I took the chance and changed my mail client. I even can <a href="findpost.pl?id=2112086" target="_blank">delete attachments from received mails</a> now!

I'm feeling really relaxed now, knowing my important mail data in the hands of a program aware of their value. I'm using Opera just for surfing now. That way I'm not bound to it by data and might switch it in minutes if necessary.

Have a nice day,
Jochen