Thank you Opera

hi All

I thought this might be useful in case anyone else has had this problem. I'm moving from an XP machine to a W7 machine and the initial transfer went just fine. All bookmarks etc came thru great. I copied all my profile folders (including mail) from the old box to the new box, installed a new copy of 11.52 and it worked like a charm. The only problem is that Mail and Chat Accounts was greyed out in the Tools menu and I was getting a startup error:

There was a problem initializing Opera Mail.
Failed to open the following file:
C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Application Data\Opera\Opera\mail\omailbase.dat

Restart your system and try again. If that does not work, restoration from your backup source might be necessary. If that is not possible or does not work, report a bug on http://bugs.opera.com/wizard/ and search the forums for help with this issue.

So I looked at the ...opera\opera\operaprefs.ini and the ...opera\opera\profile\opera6.ini (that's been there since V6) files and found this in both:

[Mail]
Mail Root Directory=C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Application Data\Opera\Opera\mail

Of course, this is the XP path which has been changed in W7 to this:

C:\users\Me\AppData\roaming\Opera\Opera\mail

I changed the original path to the W7 version and restarted Opera - all is good again, including the mail client configuration. 4 years worth of business email was succesfully transferred and saved, and I just went back to work. You gotta love that.


Best,
Allan

Note that if you remove the "Mail Root Directory" line from operaprefs.ini, Opera will use the default location, which should also make transferring Opera's profile folders across systems a lot easier. Same thing applies to a lot of other settings that take paths under [User Prefs].

When "Mail Root Directory" is specified in operaprefs.ini, that tells Opera the user has explicitly changed/set the setting. If it's not specified, Opera sees that as the user has never messed with the setting.

Also note that you can change the setting at opera:config#Mail%20Root%20Directory, save and restart Opera.

Also, see <http://my.opera.com/operawiki/forums/topic.dml?id=1132992> and <http://my.opera.com/operawiki/forums/topic.dml?id=1132442>.

Thanks for the tips burnout. Better than my trial and error approach. So many things in life don't go smoothly, but this a was a huge relief.

Best,
Allan