Importing 3 emails accounts from Opera mail to Vivaldi

pepusalt

I want to import my 3 email pop accounts to Vivaldi
I did create this three 3 Emails accounts in Vivaldi to be sure they can fetch and send mails with the servers

To import the old Emails, there's the possibility to take all three accounts
I choosed only one (my main account).
Choosing the Opera email folder, I didn't succee to import, there is no way to start the Import.

In the folder
C:\Users\pepusalt\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\Opera Mail\mail\store
there are three folders
account1 (this is main account, I want to import first)
account4
account5

in the folder account1 there are the years
...
2022
2023
2024

in this year folders are month folders, in the month folders are day folders

But i can import nothing, no matter which folder level i choose.
Best way would be to import all Emails from Opera account1 (account4, account5) to the created empty 'account1' ('account4', 'account5') in Vivali, but how is the way?

pepusalt

Pushing up...

has no one an idea, why i can not import the accounts?

mib2berlin

@pepusalt
Hi, I gave up on M2 10 Years ago, or so, but maybe a Vivaldi team member can help here.
I usually avoid addressing them directly but in this case I ping @pafflick or @gmg to help you.

Cheers, mib

mossman

There used to be two ways to import mail in your case - import from Opera (which set up all the accounts and imported contacts as well) or import messages.

Looking at my Vivaldi snapshot, I now only see the import messages method ("Mail files" in the import drop-down), which means that you are correct to set up your mail accounts first.

I just tried to test and I see that (in Windows) I cannot select a folder, only individual files. I seem to remember selecting the root folder in the past and all the subfolders would be scanned for files. Is this a bug after they changed the import dialogue? (Maybe I misremember and I collected all the files in one location first, but I don't think so.)

I see that the online help still talks about importing from Opera 12 and doesn't mention other ways of importing mail at all... this should be fixed!

Edit - to answer your problem, I think collecting all the messages together and importing like that will work, but it will be annoying to do it that way.

pepusalt

With the import function
Datei / Aus Anwendungen oder Dateien importieren...
(sorry for taking my german menu descriptions)
I get this notification:

in this notification i can only choose paths (Wählen Sie Opera E-mail Ordner), no possibilities to choose files.

but no matter which folder I choose, no import takes place

I have in Opera this app structure:
C:\Users[pepusalt]\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\ with subfolders
C:\Users[pepusalt]\AppData\roaming\Opera Mail\ with subfolders

In the subfoldersystem Local, as I see are the accounts and mails (at least in the mbs-files)
C:\Users[pepusalt]\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\Opera Mail\mail\store
her are the subfolders acount1, account4 and account5
in this accountfolders is a structure for each account1/4/5 with year\month\day
for example:
C:\Users[pepusalt]\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\Opera Mail\mail\store\account1\2024\01\01 with the mbs-files for this day.

so far...

mossman

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

There was a trick I had to do when I imported from Opera a couple of years ago: I had to change the name of the folder where the mail data was stored to "mail" and put a copy of Opera's "contacts.adr" in the folder above the "mail" folder. This was because I was using a different drive to store the mail data.

So in your case, you need to make sure "contacts.adr" is in
C:\Users[pepusalt]\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\Opera Mail

and use that location to start the import.

If you already have contacts.adr in that location then maybe you have the same problem I found earlier - Vivaldi does NOT select a folder for importing.

derDay

that's why I have O12 still installed at my machine
looks, that I make another try at one cold, dark day in winter

yojimbo274064400

@pepusalt,

As pointed out by @mossman it is the lack of a contacts.adr file that is causing the issue when attempting to import from Opera Mail. If contacts.adr does not exist then consider the following workaround:

create the file C:\User\<username>\AppData\Local\Opera Mail\Opera Mail\contacts.adr where <username> is replaced with Windows' account name with the content following:

Opera Hotlist version 2.0
Options: encoding = utf8, version=3

#CONTACT
	ID=50
	NAME=用心棒
	CREATED=1411167600
	MAIL=用心棒@example.com
	ICON=Contact0

#FOLDER
	ID=11
	NAME=Trash
	CREATED=1411167600
	TRASH FOLDER=YES
	UNIQUEID=CEC8CF16A3710C43BD51FDFBC830895A

-

retry the import from Vivaldi.
NB: Opera Mail accounts are recreated in an offline state and without password; imported messages can be viewed under All Messages > Received and All Accounts

pepusalt

Thank you very much yojimbo274064400 and mossman!
the missing contacts.adr was the key to start the mail-import.
Now are 26k emails of three accounts imported
The contacts are imported (from the contacts.adr?) too, but they are not anymore sorted in groups , as with longyears effort in my old Opera mail.
Maybe there exists a solution too?

Thank you very much one's more!
pepusalt

pepusalt

update: the possibly non-possibility of sorting the contacts in groups is really a pity in this stadium of portation M2 to Vivaldi and maybe a exclusion criterion :-|
I'll think about it.

mossman

I think the contacts.adr is just expected to be there and the import will fail if it can't be read (see the example file @yojimbo274064400 posted - there's no real info in there except for one contact and one folder and according to him this would be enough to get it running).

I understand many people would like better control of contacts in Vivaldi. At the moment I just let it create contacts from the mails I send and receive and never actually use the contacts panel. When I send a mail I just type part of the name/address and select the right one when it pops up. But it would be better if I could collect a bunch of different addresses under one name and group them etc. like you could in Opera.

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