Importing mails from Opera M2 to Thunderbird

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 “imports”. 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 “import”. 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.