Extracting contacts from a specific opera mail view or label

Hi:

I'm using the new Opera (11.51) and also have an older version (7.21) The older version isn't being used but I have some valuable contacts on it. In the older version you could organize your email in "Views", in the newer version the same function is now called "Labels."

Here's what I want to do but I don't know if it's possible:

I want to be able to highlight the received emails in a particular "View" or "Label" and then export just the email address to a list. I have over 600 emails from people that have purchased a product that I invented. I now have a new version of that product and I want to send them an announcement. Not all the emails in the particular "View" are from people that have purchased the product - hence the need to highlight just the emails I want to export to the list. I hope this makes sense?

Thanks!
Joel

Welcome to the My Opera community!

I don't know about 7.21, but I'll give you directions for newer versions of Opera:

What you'd do is open each message and click the drop-down next to each address you want and add each as a contant in the contacts panel. Then, you'd export your contacts as abook.adr and then import abook.adr into the new Opera. If you want to group the messages first, you can create a filter in 7.21 and drag the messages you want to it. Then, open each message in that filter and add the contacts to the contacts panel.

As an alternative, you can right-click on the filter and export all those messages to an mbs file. Then, you can write some script to extract the addresses from the mbs file. If you describe the problem well, asking on stackoverflow.com could get you a good answer on how to do it.

But, if the mbs file isn't that big, you could just open the mbs file in a text editor and grab them yourself. You might even be able to use the regex find and replace mode in notepad++ to replace all lines that don' start with From: (or To: or Cc: or Bcc: if you need addresses from them) with an empty string. That would trim the mbs file down to just the headers you want.

Also, if you export sent messages from 7.21 and import then with "move to sent" into a newer Opera, all those contacts should be added to the contacts panel I think.

Thanks Burnout 426. If I have to open each email then I might as well just cut and paste the address to a text file seems like it would take the same amount of time. I don't want to mess with the mbs file thing - too over my head. Thanks again for your time!
Joel

I figured something out that worked for my particular needs. First, I had to delete all the current contacts in my list. I realize this is probably a deal-breaker for most people but I really didn't care about my contact list because I have saved emails from all my important contacts, so I can just bring up an old email to get their contact info. Once the contacts were deleted, I created a new folder in the contact window. I then highlighted all the emails that I wanted to get the contact info from. I clicked on the "Add contact" button and then added all the highlighted emails to the new contact folder I had made. In the "Contacts" view I could click on my new folder and all of my new selected contacts are now in the list. I highlighted the list and then selected "Compose" as if I was going to write a new email. All of my new contacts now appear perfectly on the "To:" address bar. Once all of my addresses appear, I could highlight them and copy and paste them to a text file to save the list for when I decide to send out my list.

Yeh, that will work better. I forgot that "add contact" works on a selection.