Failure to Completely Import Mail and Settings from Thunderbird to Opera

This all started when I followed the instructions for importing my mail from Thunderbird to Opera. I saw the progress bars as they filled up showing Opera’s progress in copying my mailboxes and settings from Thunderbird.

After it was finished, the first thing that I noticed is that it only transfered my mailing groups over, but none of my other entries from Thunderbird’s address book.

I searched for information on how to import my Thunderbird address book into the Opera contacts list. And found this in the knowledge base:

Importing contacts/address books from other programs

Opera can import contacts from Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, Netscape 6/7 and old versions of Opera.

In Opera on Windows or Unix, from the menu, select Settings > Import and export > Import mail

But this is not about just the contacts, this is to import mail. This is not helpful. Although, it does indicate that all of the contacts should have been imported.

The next thing I noticed was none of my three accounts were transfered over. Then I realized all of the mail was missing. What was Opera doing all of that time?

Since I had no access to anything, I simply deleted it to start over. I was thinking that maybe during setup I was supposed to indicate which account it was supposed to go to. Which meant I had to set up the accounts first, because Opera wouldn’t automatically import them along with the mail. I opened Thunderbird to use it as a reference while I set up my accounts in Opera. Meanwhile I also realized that I had three accounts, but it was transferring only mail for one. If it dumps all three accounts into the same one, that will not work at all.

Because the instructions in online help and the tutorials are either incomplete or the options they refer to are missing they are useless.

What am I doing wrong? If there are better instructions, would someone please point me to them or post them here?

To import from Thunderbird, you want to follow <http://operawiki.info/ImportPOPFoldersFromThunderbird>. Ignore the thunderbird-specific account wizard as it doesn't work that great. (I don't think any of the import wizards import contacts at all anymore anyway.)

For your contacts, you need to export them as a csv file and convert them. Then, you need to import the adr file into Opera via "Menu -> settings -> import and export -> import Opera contacts". Or, you can import the address book into mail.opera.com (you already have an account) and export it to adr format and then import it.

Note that if all you have is IMAP accounts in Thunderbird, you don't need to import any messages or settings. You just setup the IMAP accounts in Opera directly and that's it. Then, just import your contacts as suggested above.

Originally posted by burnout426:

Ignore the thunderbird-specific account wizard as it doesn't work that great. (I don't think any of the import wizards import contacts at all anymore anyway.)

As I suspected.

You’re kidding.

All that work? No thank you. Thunderbird works fine. I’ll just keep using it until someone fixes the wizard. Pity, Opera is such a good browser except for this.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

All that work? No thank you.

It's not a lot of work. It just looks like it because it's explained in words.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

Thunderbird works fine. I’ll just keep using it until someone fixes the wizard.

That's cool.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

opera is such a good browser except for this.

To be fair, other clients don't have an "import from Opera" option at all. If you want to import from Opera into other clients, you have to do just as much work. And, for Thunderbird specifically, before you can even do that, you have to install an extension. Other clients don't support importing addresses from Opera either.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

until someone fixes the wizard.

The the import wizards don't receive any attention anymore, so this may be a long time.

Note though, if you use IMAP instead of POP, it's easy to swtich clients or use multiple clients.

Originally posted by burnout426:

Note though, if you use IMAP instead of POP, it's easy to swtich clients or use multiple clients.

Yes, I noticed that. . . . Would I be able to switch it back to POP after importing to Opera?

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

Would I be able to switch it back to POP after importing to Opera?

In Thunderbird, if you also add an IMAP account to connect to your account and move all messages but sent message into the "Inbox" IMAP folder and drag all messages from the POP account that are no longer on the server to the "Inbox" IMAP folder (to upload them), all your messages will be on the server. Then, you could just setup POP in Opera and Opera would fetch all your messages. Then, the only thing you'd have to import is the Sent mbox file from Thunderbird using the "import from generic mbox" option with with "move to sent" set. Then, you'd have all your messages in Opera.

Depending on your connection and how many messages you have that could go fast or could take a while. The downside to that way is that none of the messages will be sorted into labels to mimic folders. But, you can also create the labels and drag the messages you want there.

But, if you setup IMAP in Opera, you can't really just switch the account to POP. If you only have one account for example and setup IMAP, you can export "All Messages/Received" to an mbs file. Then, you can use the generic mbox importer to import that mbs file, which will create a POP account where you can edit the settings to connect to the server. Then, you can export the IMAP sent folder to an mbs file and import that with "move to sent". But, really, what you'd want to do is export each IMAP folder except for "Inbox". Then, you'd import each one into a label similar to the directions given in the link that I previously mentioned. The messages from the "Inbox" will be automatically fetched with POP. But, you still have to get the messages that are no longer on the server and only in Thunderbird into Opera either by importing them directly or uploading them to IMAP as mentioned above.

However, if in Thunderbird, you never removed any of the messages from the server, you can just setup the POP account in Opera and it'll just fetch all the messages. Then, you'd only have to import sent. Can't really give more specifc directions without knowing exactly how you have things set up.

But, as far as IMAP goes, there's not much reason not to use it if you have a good mail provider.

Well, I suppose up until now I really never needed to use anything but POP since mostly all mail services use it (I am not certain if Yahoo has IMAP or not). I never really asked at my ISP if IMAP is available.

And I wind up with a two-for. Now I know what ‘Labels’ are.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

Well, I suppose up until now I really never needed to use anything but POP since mostly all mail services use it (I am not certain if Yahoo has IMAP or not). I never really asked at my ISP if IMAP is available.

Yeh, old mail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo don't support IMAP. They discriminate against Opera anyway. They're also very buggy and they don't fix bugs very often. I wouldn't use them for anything more than test accounts.

Gmail, GMX, Fastmail and My Opera Mail (the webmail is at mail.opera.com) all support IMAP. Even AOL (webmail.aol.com for the website) supports IMAP. (They're all free except for Fastmail. Fastmail has a free version. But, there's not much space and you have to use someone else's smtp server (like the one that My Opera provides.)

Yahoo does support IMAP for mobile phones though. So, Yahoo does have an IMAP server. You can even connect to it with a desktop client. But, you'll often get errors because they do some non-standard stuff. There are special builds of Thunderbird that work around the non-standard stuff.

Yahoo supports POP. But, it's not free in every country.

For mail provided by ISPs, you often don't get enough space and their spam filtering often sucks.

Gmail IMAP is just awesome.

I have no problem with my ISP, and when I do I get to communicate with a real human being . . . who understands English . . . who knows what they are talking about . . . and is there to help you, not sell you stuff.

Yahoo! Is always ‘improving’ things especially the mail, but the one thing that just gets worse is the customer service. Unfortunately, I have been spoiled by companies like Boxer Software and Provide.Net.

While looking at my ISP’s settings for IMAP, I noticed webmail is different from either POP3 or IMAP. Is this why I couldn’t access my website host’s mail with Thunderbird? Will I have problems with Opera?

Now that I think of it, Yahoo! Mail must be a webmail account unless you pay for the POP3 account. That is why it’s so buggy. By trying to limit access to the accounts the way they do, they cause more problems for themselves.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

I have no problem with my ISP, and when I do I get to communicate with a real human being

That's good.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

While looking at my ISP’s settings for IMAP, I noticed webmail is different from either POP3 or IMAP. Is this why I couldn’t access my website host’s mail with Thunderbird? Will I have problems with Opera?

I don't know. If your ISP mail server support IMAP and you get the settings correct, it should work in both Opera's built-in mail client and Thunderbird no problem. As for using the web page interface (webmail) that should just work in both Opera and Firefox unless there's a bug on the site.

Originally posted by burnout426:

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

I don't know. If your ISP mail server support IMAP and you get the settings correct, it should work in both Opera's built-in mail client and Thunderbird no problem. As for using the web page interface (webmail) that should just work in both Opera and Firefox unless there's a bug on the site.

You mean I can only access webmail by browsing to the site, correct?

Originally posted by burnout426:

I don't know. If your ISP mail server support IMAP and you get the settings correct, it should work in both Opera's built-in mail client and Thunderbird no problem. As for using the web page interface (webmail) that should just work in both Opera and Firefox unless there's a bug on the site.

You mean I can only access webmail by browsing to the site, correct?

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

You mean I can only access webmail by browsing to the site, correct?

Webmail, by definition, is accessing your mail via a web page. So, that question doesn't really make sense. A mail provider might allow you to access your mail via IMAP and or POP and or a web page.

Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and such are often referred to as "webmails". But, that's only because accessing your mail through the web page is the most common way for them. They're still mail providers and might allow you to access your mail via IMAP and or POP too.

Yes, my web host does allow POP. Yahoo will allow POP access if you pay for it. I don’t know about Gmail, but my guess is for them POP is a premium service too. I used to have Hotmail and it could be accessed by POP, but they may have changed the policy in the past couple decades.

Well, outside of a little tweaking everything is set on Opera. I am having error messages: Invalid. I may have to play with the authentication settings a little. Oh I wound up with a whole lot of duplicated messages. Thunderbird had an extension to weed them out. Anyone know if Opera has something? I checked, but I couldn’t find any.

Gmail's pop and imap are free. There are paid options for those who want more space on their mailboxes.

OK, I have tried all of the Authentication options and I still get ‘invalid command’.

Originally posted by whitephoenixus:

OK, I have tried all of the Authentication options and I still get ‘invalid command’.

If that's with Yahoo, Opera doesn't have any workaround code for it.

But, make sure you're using:

imap.mail.yahoo.com
port: 993
tls: checked
authentication: auto

smtp.mail.yahoo.com
port: 465
tls: checked
authentication: auto

You might not get any errors with that server.