Basic Troubleshooting of Mail Problems

Here are some basic things you can try first to help investigate the cause of a mail problem you have:

See opera:about for locations of profile files.

* Download the Opera installer, launch it, click "options", make sure the "install path" is set to your existing Opera so that you see "accept and upgrade" and install over the top of your existing Opera (upgrade to the same version) to repair any program file corruption.

* Run a Mail Database Consistency Check.

* Click the view button (wrench) on the mail panel toolbar and reset the mail panel to defaults.

* If it's a connection problem, enable mail logging. This is one of the most important things you can do.

* Check in other clients like Thunderbird and Sylpheed.

* Close down Opera and delete the cache, opcache and temporary_downloads folders.

* Fix missing/broken buttons and ui elements.

* Rebuild the search index (if having search problems).

* If you have Low-bandwidth mode turned on, turn it off.

* Close down Opera and rename operaprefs.ini in the preferences folder so Opera creates a new one.

* Check the permissions of the mail folder to make sure Opera can read and write to it.

* If you have anti-virus software, turn off the email scanner and web scanner (or disable the anti-virus completely) to see if that helps.

* If you have a firewall, make sure Opera isn't blocked.

* In a mail account's properties, retype the username and password and ok out. Try changing the username and password to incorrect values. Then ok out. Then, go back in and retype the username and password correctly and ok out. Try doing the same trick with other settings like ports, tls, server names etc.

* On the general tab in the account's properties, make sure an email address is set in the "mail address" field.

* Make sure the IMAP/POP and SMTP ports are correct. See this page for port configuration options.

* If your username is your email address, make sure you include have "user@example.com" in the username field and not just "username".

* Investigate whether your mail provider changed things (like port, server name, the format of your username etc.).

* Download the Opera installer and use the "standalone installation" option to install to a folder on your desktop. Setup mail in it (do not import anything) and see if things work fine there. If they do, replace that Opera's mail folder with a *copy* of your original. Then see if things still work fine in the Opera or not.

You can do the same thing with the latest snapshot at <http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/> if you want. Maybe it's just a bug in your current Opera that's already fixed in the snapshots (and therefore some future version).

* Try to remember if Opera or your computer crashes recently. Investigate hard drive corruption. Run scandisk/chkdks with repair options.

* Make sure you hard drive isn't full.

* Makes sure you don't have any viruses, spyware or malware. Makes sure your system hosts file, system proxy settings and network DNS settings haven't been hijacked. Make sure your hosts file entries don't have any invalid chars like "," or "(" or ")" etc.

* For each view, click the view button on the mail toolbar above the message list, goto "show" and make sure everything is checked/unchecked how you want. Under "View -> Period", make sure it's set to "forever". Edit: The period button is in "shift + F12 -> buttons mail/mail view". You can drag it to the toolbar above the message list.

* If messages appear to be sent, but don't actually go out, open the "All Messages/Outbox" view, goto "view -> show" and make sure "show sent" is checked. If there are any messages stuck in there that shouldn't be, delete them.

* If you have problems opening attachments, goto "ctrl + F12 -> advanced -> downloads" and edit the mime type for the attachment and make sure it's action is set properly ("open with Opera" or "open with default application" for example). If the attachment still doesn't open right, right-click on the message for the attachment and select "view all headers and message". Then, look for the "Content-Type" header for the attachment part and see if the attachment was actually sent with the correct mime type.

Also, make sure the disk cache isn't turned off. That can break saving of attachments.

If you need to reset your file type settings in Opera, close down Opera and delete handlers.ini in the preferences folder.

* If you have trouble attaching a file, make sure the file isn't open in another program.

* If a message won't send, make sure one of the field values isn't too long and make sure the adress syntax of each email address in the fields is correct.

* If messages don't load right and if you use Opera's content blocker (urlfilter.ini), make sure there are no rules that block "file:", "opera:", "attachment:", "cid:" and "operamail:" URIs etc., as Opera mail makes use of URIs like that. Also, if you sync the content blocker with Opera Link, disable syncing with Opera Link to see if that fixes things.

* If printing messages come out completely blank, makes sure you don't have iframes disabled in Opera.

* If you have AVG installed and email content just shows symbols, see this thread.

* If you have major problems with an IMAP account, delete the IMAP account and add it back in.