Importing 3 emails accounts from Opera mail to Vivaldi

LongTimeUser

I am in the same boat as OP. I have a very old M2 installation which I used until yesterday when whatever solution I had to make it halfway secure finally was too deprecated to work anymore with whatever measures my ISP has in place.

As with OP, my mail stuff is in a separate folder from the other Opera 12 files; i.e. folders like "mail" are in ...\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera... and everything else is in ...\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera... As suggested above, I copied the contacts.adr from the latter to the former.

BUT my main problem is this: the import dialog does not seem to have "Opera E-Mail" anymore:

Instead, if I choose "Opera 12.x", I get everything except mails (even if use "Choose a Different Profile" to point to the ...\AppData\Local... version):

(Although this support article implies that "Opera 12.x" should also be able to import mail: https://help.vivaldi.com/mail/mail-advanced/import-mail-and-contacts-from-opera-m2/ )

(I also tried to symlink the mail directory into ...\AppData\Roaming... via mklink, but that didn't change anything either.)

If I chose "Mail files" in the import dialog, it looks like I would need to pick individual files, which is not an option since my old mails go back decades.

What now? Has the option to import M2 mails been removed since the above comments? Or is there still a way?

EDIT: Oof. I found out that Opera can export all those mails as a multi-GB .mbs file. This can be imported in Vivaldi via the "Mail files" option, but... it crashes after 43 or so mails have been read. Back to the drawing board.

What would happen if I were to simply copy the raw .mbs files into Vivaldi's mail storage (renaming them to .eml as I go)? That would be pretty simple with a bit of scripting, and the folder formats seem to be the same. Is there a function in Vivaldi to re-scan those folders and build up whatever index structures it uses?

Tbh I'm a little bit worried about all this. Mail is my most important permanent data, I'm not sure if I can trust this, judging from the experience so far.

WildEnte

@LongTimeUser Opera12 import has been deprecated. I have tinkered a lot with moving mails from Opera12 into Vivaldi. I know two ways that work:

via an IMAP server. Test this with very few unimportant messages first before going all in:
a) Create some IMAP Account with some other service provider (also Vivaldi Mail may work if you have less than 5GB).
b) Connect to Opera12, move all emails from your old account to the new IMAP account,
c) connect Vivaldi, download the emails, and later consider setting the account to offline.
Vivaldi's .mbs import from one big file is not perfect, but it's being worked on. I have had success using import/export via a detour using emClient (which is a very, very good email client but the free version only gives you one account or so, and I want my email integrated in the browser).
a) export Opera12 mails into .mbs files. Make sure to separate sent and received
b) import those mbs files into emClient
c) export the emails from emClient into individual eml files
d) import into Vivaldi using 'import mail files'

Export your .mbs files from Opera12. Make sure to keep sent and received separated. Then

LongTimeUser

@WildEnte, awesome, thanks for your reply. IMAP sounds great, avoids all the weird shenanigans I or other people tried before in this thread.

I found some pretty easy-to-install docker imap server ("antespi/docker-imap-devel") that seems to be good for this use case. No faffing around with uploading all of that to some mail provider.

I'll come back in case it doesn't work for some reason, but so far very promising.

LongTimeUser

OK, I gave up. That local imap server worked fine with Opera (including TLS), I could create folders and copy my mails from Received or Sent into them.

But connecting from Vivaldi failed for the IMAP port due to some very weird TLS problem (the dovecot within the container gave a ssl certificate error - not Vivaldi (the client), but dovecot). I have no idea why that could be; I mean Vivaldi doesn't use a client certificate so why would the server complain. I poked around a bit and decided it's a no go.

<rant>

Also, I noticed that the Spam functionality in Vivaldi seems to work with IMAP servers only (because Vivaldi simply copies the mails you flag as Spam into a folder, and those of course only exist for IMAP). For reasons, I want to stay with POP3 though. This left such a bad aftertaste (together with all the other weirdness I encountered through all this) that I frankly did not feel Vivaldi is a sound future mail client for me. As I said, I require my mail client to be one of the most robust and functional pieces on this PC. Literally every little thing I tried here with Vivaldi was either weird, non-functional or flakey.

</rant>

Although I am otherwise a total Vivaldi fanboi, using it exclusively on all my machines and phones, I sat back a bit and thought about what I was doing in the first place, and eventually due to some lucky stroke got an idea how to fix my original Opera M2 setup to go on working. I'm a very happy camper, now back safe and sound with Opera as a mail client, and I sure hope I can keep it alive and kicking for a few more years.

estrogernot

I have been using Opera with M2 since 2004 (12.18 just as an email client for the past years) and transitioned to Vivaldi M3 on a new Win 11 PC just now.

Here is how it worked for me. Quite smoothly, actually.

Copy the entire Opera folder from my old machines C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local to the new machine C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local
Copy the entire Opera folder from my old machine C:\Users<user>\AppData\Roaming to the new machine C:\Users<user>\AppData\Roaming
Download an outdated version of Vivaldi, which still supports import from Opera. I randomly chose Vivaldi.6.1.3035.111.x64.exe from https://vivaldi.com/de/download/archive/?platform=win
Install this version and start it. Do not close or restart it, as this would update Vivaldi to the most recent version.
Got to File -> Import from Applications or Files and choose Opera 12.x (not Opera Email). In my case, all 4 Opera Email profiles were correctly identified and shown.
Select 'Email' (and maybe other things) and start import.
Wait (it did take quite a while) until all mails are imported and database indexes are created.
Restart Vivaldi, wait until all updates on email database are finished, check settings of imported profiles.
Enjoy my ~150k Emails successfully imported into Vivaldi M3

rjm

@mossman said in Importing 3 emails accounts from Opera mail to Vivaldi:

@pepusalt So (checking my old machine) I think Opera import is only an option when Opera is installed.

I believe not really. When you start import from apps or files, and an Opera 12.x is shown, it should rely on the profile path which is shown below in this import dialog. In Linux: /home/rob/.opera/operaprefs.ini.

However, if I move the whole .opera folder with subfolders onto my new notebook, there Vivaldi does not show up with Opera 12.x. So there must be another detail that seems to be missing. A working full installation should not do it (opera 12.x cannot be installed on current Linux because of failing dependencies). But I would favour doing the import on the new notebook because it processes considerably faster.

Addendum: I tried it using the recipe of @estrogernot, and it recognizes the pure opera data. At that time I realized that I had installed 7.1 before from flatpak (Linux). This version could look at another path for existing opera data and settings. Then I installed 7.1 (from archived .deb downloads, and it works well, too.

rjm

Upon importing Opera 12 maildata into Vivaldi I'm confronted with all unread (an unseen) status. I don't know whether I can change the status to seen and read globally, especially related to the split seen/read feature in Vivaldi.
At first all mails titles in the list are blue. Just as in Opera, when the mail is not touched (and it's content becomes visible). The only difference: In Opera, the colour turns to black immediately; in Vivaldi, a mail must remain visible for a short time (approx. 2-3 seconds) and is also associated with a second count (I can't imagine to do this manually for each mail - multiple select is possible, but it does not affect the "seen" state.
The second status is confirmed read using the 'K' key. In Opera as well as in Vivaldi.

But it would be best when blue and read status from Opera would be conserved upon import. Is that technically possible? Yet apart from the question if it would become a feature (improvement) or not.

mib2berlin

@rjm
Hi, no idea about the import but you can select all mails with Ctrl+A and use K, for example.
You can use Shift+Click, Ctrl+Click like in a text editor.

Cheers, mib

rjm

@mib2berlin
Mhhm, never done K over a selection. Erase (e.g.) yes, but K not. Simply because it made no sense. Thanks for this hint!
Quite logically, then also the unseen flag is reset.

rjm

Er.... just another import experience:
My own labels (beyond the standard ones "important", " to Do" etc.) are not part of the import. E.g. mails related to individual customers are assigned a label. I had to define the labels again and then set apply rule on all mails (instead of only newly incoming mails).
But this (rule) method would not re-assign a label (a "tag") to mails that had (in Opera) been manually assigned a customer related label, e.g. because every rule can hardly assign each mail appropriate labels that does not miss out anything. E.g. a mail from a third party where the customer is not mentioned in the text and also not in the header fields, but is nevertheless customer-related.