Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses)

mossman

As mentioned in several earlier threads (e.g. here, here and here) Vivaldi simply does not let you use the same e-mail address to create a new account...

So my question is: why? I don't see a technical reason if the account is given its own ID (as evidenced in the file storage folders) and I don't think users would be confused unless they really had no clue what they were doing. But I can see valid reasons - e.g. you want to close off one account for archiving after several years and start with a clean account from the next year, or - in my case - I have a POP3 Hotmail account which is no longer allowed to connect without Oauth so I need to either switch to IMAP (not possible through the mail settings) or create a new IMAP account with the same mail address.

When I try to create a new IMAP account - even with the old POP3 one set to offline and the mail settings altered - the set-up dialogue simply refuses to allow it. The button to test server settings does not activate.

I stopped trying after a while (I will wait for a weekend when I have the time to spend a few hours on this) but in general I find the mail set-up to be too "protect the dumb user" and I've struggled in the past when it insists on checking with the server before proceeding and won't let me just fill in settings and save it.

Not sure if this should be called a feature request - I just wanted to rant a bit about this out-of-character blocking by Vivaldi, which usually lets users configure things any way they want... But now I am going to have to go out of my way to work around the way Vivaldi does things, like it's something from Microsoft or Google!

yojimbo274064400

Consider submitting a feature request if one does not already exist.

AFAICS, an account's email address generates the same data folder location regardless of the protocol used, i.e. IMAP or POP. This alone would be reason enough to justify not allowing an email address to exist for more than one protocol.

mossman

@yojimbo274064400 said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

Consider submitting a feature request if one does not already exist.

AFAICS, an account's email address generates the same data folder location regardless of the protocol used, i.e. IMAP or POP. This alone would be reason enough to justify not allowing an email address to exist for more than one protocol.

I see - well if that's the case then my strategy will probably be to try moving all the messages (through the UI) to a new offline account, delete the old account (and any leftover files) then create a new IMAP one. I always assumed the code-like name assigned to the data folder was random.

edwardp

@mossman

See this Vivaldi Help section regarding the deletion of accounts. Scroll down to Important, it states it will not be possible to register with the same username again, once an account is deleted.

Once a Gmail account is deleted, its username can no longer be used. The same policy applies at Yahoo/AOL. The prohibition on usernames being reused or recycled, seems to be the standard.

yojimbo274064400

@mossman said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

@yojimbo274064400 said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

Consider submitting a feature request if one does not already exist.

AFAICS, an account's email address generates the same data folder location regardless of the protocol used, i.e. IMAP or POP. This alone would be reason enough to justify not allowing an email address to exist for more than one protocol.

I see - well if that's the case then my strategy will probably be to try moving all the messages (through the UI) to a new offline account, delete the old account (and any leftover files) then create a new IMAP one. I always assumed the code-like name assigned to the data folder was random.

Initially I had thought the same.

Whichever migration strategy is used to go from POP to IMAP do remember to have an up to date backup of your emails.

Do consider raising a feature request for the ability to setup a new account using an existing email address already setup but with a different protocol here, Mail, Calendar & Feeds Feature Requests | Vivaldi Forum. For example:

mossman

@edwardp said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

@mossman

See this Vivaldi Help section regarding the deletion of accounts. Scroll down to Important, it states it will not be possible to register with the same username again, once an account is deleted.

Once a Gmail account is deleted, its username can no longer be used. The same policy applies at Yahoo/AOL. The prohibition on usernames being reused or recycled, seems to be the standard.

?!? I'm not talking about the mail service user account, I'm talking about retrieving messages in the browser... I need to remove the old POP account in the mailer to replace it with an IMAP account (connecting to the same mail service account).

Edit - Aha! I see this thread has been incorrectly moved to the "community & services" forum. @Zalex108 Can it be put back in the correct mail forum please?

edwardp

@mossman

The title of this thread currently contains: (let us re-use existing mail addresses)

I replied appropriately, indicating this is not possible.

If that is not the issue, then the title of the thread needs to he changed.

mossman

@yojimbo274064400 not one, but THREE new feature requests!

Allow set-up of new account to use existing mail address

Allow change of mail protocol for a mail account

Remove restrictive need for server authentication during mail set-up

mossman

@edwardp said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

@mossman

The title of this thread currently contains: (let us re-use existing mail addresses)

I replied appropriately, indicating this is not possible.

If that is not the issue, then the title of the thread needs to he changed.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree! In the context of being IN THE MAIL, CALENDAR & FEEDS section of the forum, my discussion of mail accounts IN THE BROWSER was entirely correct.

mossman

@mossman said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

@yojimbo274064400 said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

Consider submitting a feature request if one does not already exist.

AFAICS, an account's email address generates the same data folder location regardless of the protocol used, i.e. IMAP or POP. This alone would be reason enough to justify not allowing an email address to exist for more than one protocol.

I see - well if that's the case then my strategy will probably be to try moving all the messages (through the UI) to a new offline account, delete the old account (and any leftover files) then create a new IMAP one. I always assumed the code-like name assigned to the data folder was random.

So I spent several hours over the weekend dealing with this, and... it was not easy at all!

When I tried moving messages using the UI it seemed to leave most of the actual files in the data directory of the old account. I tried to rebuild the database (a couple of hours) - which made no difference. When I compared the two data directories of the old POP3 account and the new offline account (for which I had to fill in a dummy e-mail address... annoying) the offline account had less than half the files of the old account. There were also a couple of "lost" messages sitting in the old POP3 account which would not be moved. One of them showed up in the root only, one showed in the root as being in sent but then there was nothing in the sent folder...

I compared the files in the two directories and found that most of them were duplicates. I was trying to find out why there were still files in the old POP3 data but couldn't work out a pattern. Then I noticed that both the old POP3 directory and the new offline account directory contained much less data than the backup directory of the original account. At this point, having wasted a day, I gave up on this method.

The next day I deleted both accounts (the data was still not deleted so I did it manually after closing Vivaldi), created a new offline account and started importing messages from the backup instead. This also had a few annoyances:

as mentioned before, it is not possible to just select a directory to import so I had to manually gather groups of message files into one directory to import. I collected files from one or two years each time so it would import a couple of thousand messages in one go. After import, I had to select a different folder, wait for it to re-index, go to the inbox, select all and mark read. Rinse and repeat for a few hours...
once everything was imported it was all in the inbox, so I had to manually sort the sent mail. I have a filter for this, which made it a lot easier, but I still couldn't just select all and move since - apparently - a few filltered messages came from different acounts/mailboxes. This was a result of the infamous "sending yourself a test mail" problem - so a message would be marked as sent from the account in question, but there was also a copy from the inbox of the account I'd sent to. Cue a couple more hours transferring blocks of messages to the sent folder and trying to track down the ones filtered from a different account...

Anyway, it's done now. But I'm quite experienced in this sort of thing so I think an average user would either lose a lot of data or have given up. This needs to work better!

Durtro

This thread makes me remember a bug report I made:

(VB-108163) Can't create the same local account if previously deleted

That case is even worse in a way since even after deleting the local account I couldn't re-use. It also indicates that some leftovers remain.

I also have 11 accounts in the mail panel but only 10 in settings, so more leftovers I guess. Obviously the extra account in the panel has noting in it and shows only this:

mossman

@mossman said in Mail set-up is too restrictive (let us re-use existing mail addresses):

This needs to work better!

Why is there no mail export yet? The only reason I had to faff around pulling messages out of a backup file tree is because mail export is missing. The whole process would have been simple (and user friendly) if I could have selected all the received mail and exported that, then selected all the sent mail and exported that, deleted the account, then imported into the new one.

Not as simple as toggling a POP3/IMAP option in the settings, though...

The useability of mail (and feeds!) still feels half-finished in lots of ways.

And it's worrying that everything went wrong when I moved mail in the UI. Clearly there were errors in the system, like in the case for @Durtro. I'm tempted to delete other accounts and import them again from backup (now I have a proven method for it) to make sure all messages on the filesystem are actually available in the mail database.