Importing mails from Opera M2 to Thunderbird
September 8th, 2004 Leave a comment Visited 53 times, 2 so far today
Or for that matter any mail client that can export in or use Mbox mail format. Mbox is one of the most widely used mail storage system though many applications now prefer to use proprietary technology. MS Outlook is one such software product.
Opera supports Mbox though it modifies it in normal usage for the access point functionality but it lets you export any folder as Mbox file. Just right click any folder and chose export feature and it exports all the mails in that access point as an Mbox format file (though the file extension used is MBS!). Similarly many other mail programs like Eudora and Pegasus also uses this file format to store mails.
Now, you want to go open source and shift to Mozilla Thunderbird? Good enough… I decided to test it too for some time and am still using it for one of my mail IDs. And I had this situation where I had to import an Mbox file lying with me to Thunderbird. So I initially tried checking out internal mail import facility in Thunderbird. Sadly, the only options I found there were importing from applications like Netscape Communicator, Eudora, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. No option to import a lonely mail file! To bad…
Caught hold of a friend on the net and got the instructions that helped me a bit. Before I go on explaining what I did to get my mails into Thunderbird, I just would like to say this… This is not the official or perfect procedure. Might work and might not work. And this was done with an Mbox file generated from Opera into Thunderbird 0.7.3 on a Windows XP machine… And knowing Mozilla, this may change or break in the next version. I really do not expect to take any responsibility of anything that went wrong on your side! :)
Here is what he told me to do…
Make a new folder in Thunderbird to hold your newly imported mails. Let’s say the name of the folder is “importsâ€. Now close Thunderbird before we can start with the importing procedure.
Find out where thunderbird is storing mails on your system. Now, this can be complicated… On a multi-user system on Windows XP, it lies in a folder structure similar to shown here:
X:/ Documents and Settings / user-name / Application Data / Thunderbird / Profiles / default / random.nam / Mail /
Where X is the drive where the OS is installed and user-name is the name you login to the system with. I am pretty sure the method would work on any alternate system like Mac OS X and Linux; just the file storage location would differ… And knowing technology, you cannot be sure.
In this folder you will have more folders for all the mail accounts that have been configured in Thunderbird. Enter the folder with the name of the mail account where you have that newly created Thunderbird folder named “importâ€. You will see 2 files with the name of all the folders you have inside Thunderbird. The files without an extension are the Mbox format files containing all the mails. Simply delete the file named “imports†here without any extension (it will be zero byte file) and copy your original Mbox file here. And rename the file name to match the original name of the file (in this case “import†without any extension).
That is it. Start Thunderbird and go to the new folder. Thunderbird should find the newly imported mails and start indexing them. And after a couple of seconds, you have the mails imported nicely with all the attachments inside Thunderbird!
Worked for me, hopefully it will work for you too.
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November 6th, 2004 at 08:23 am
This really helped.
Thanks for the information!
I did have to pu all messages in the same folder before exporting from sylpheed as an MBOX-file though, but for 100 messages or less it’s ok.
December 10th, 2004 at 04:15 am
Hello. I am from Venezuela. This really works. It´s very nice and easy to do.
Thanks……
December 21st, 2004 at 04:59 am
Thanx that was what I needed
January 5th, 2005 at 06:34 pm
Thanks for the info, barely took 5 mins and I had my inbox, sent mail and other folders all copied perfectly from opera to thunderbird.
Good Work!
January 29th, 2005 at 05:25 am
Thanks, sushubh. I found nothing on this on Mozilla’s websites. I’m very glad you posted this for Thunderbird users.
January 29th, 2005 at 05:31 am
well i am doing bad on helping people moving from opera to mozilla products. :-P
January 30th, 2005 at 07:08 pm
Works great on Thunderbird 1.0 too.
February 27th, 2005 at 10:15 pm
Ah, excellant news, this is one thing thats been preventing me moving from Opera to Firefox/Thunderbird. Makes it all the more curious that Thunderbird has no import for Opera, with it being such an easy conversion. Now I just need to find an Opera extension for Firefox ;\
March 8th, 2005 at 09:56 pm
greetingz from hungary! :) thanks for the article!
March 24th, 2005 at 09:48 pm
Yes! This was incredibly helpful. Thank you so much.
April 3rd, 2005 at 05:00 pm
about 13200 Mails exported from Opera 6 to Thunderbird. It took a couple of Minutes but everything went fine!!! Thank you for this nice guide!!
April 29th, 2005 at 07:12 am
YOU CAN IMPORT YOUR @ DIRECTLY TO THUNDERBIRD!
In Thunderbird choose “Netscape Communicator” from import menu, then your folder where you’ve got your mails (usually C:\Documents and Settings\…[your profile]…\Application Data\Opera\Mail\Storage).
Of course you have to import all your folders separately, the imported mail is put in separate folders!
May 17th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
Thank you, it works fine and quickly
June 21st, 2005 at 04:59 pm
is there any difference if i have thunderbird 1.0.2?
June 29th, 2005 at 07:32 am
I’m so glad I found this solution. It worked for me. I was trying to move some old Netscape communicator messages (didn’t have the program, just the old saved files) into Mozilla’s browser. Worked great with no problems!
August 12th, 2005 at 12:36 am
Thanks for your help! Its working correctly and simply!
November 3rd, 2005 at 04:15 am
Thank you! worked for me
November 15th, 2005 at 05:43 pm
This works for Opera 8.5 to Thunderbird 1.0.2 (On Windows XP)
Just did it. Thanks
January 22nd, 2006 at 08:50 pm
Hey, great tip. I’ll go do this now. FYI google for “thunderbird import opera” this is the first hit so congrats
March 16th, 2006 at 10:15 am
You are the man! Saved my inbox from death.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
thanks so much. i keep shifting from one browers/suite/mail software to another just for the heck of it! variety! and wanted to know how to get my mails out of opera into mozilla!