Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird
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I know that Thunderbird mail import is currently in snapshot (not stable), but I thought this might be a better place to centralise discussion on any tips and issues than scattered across the snapshot threads.
So I'll start by describing my own experiences:
First; import from Opera 12. The main headline is that I have been able (after some issues) to import my existing mail stored in Opera 12 into a snapshot and successfully got Vivaldi to pick up and send mail from those accounts. I'd like to note the following:
- It took several attempts to get the import to work in early 2021, probably because my mail is stored in a different location to the Opera profile data. IIRC I had some progress using a symbolic link to the drive where the mail data was held but the final successful attempt was made by copying the address book file to the location of the mail storage and renaming that location to mimic an Opera profile folder.
- It took several aborted attempts and a loooong time after clicking to start the import before there was any evidence of importing occurring (message in the status bar). It also took hours to complete the import (it's tens of thousands of messages). I'm not sure if anything was happening during the couple of dozen earlier attempts - in fact I was about to abort yet again when it suddenly showed a status message.
- Although I haven't done a full message count I believe most of the mail was copied over (any filesystem folders I looked in had the same messages in Vivaldi as in Opera - I note that the message files themselves are nearly identical apart from minor differences in the mail index headers).
- A number of ghost accounts were created when I had used slightly different "from" addresses etc. - a bit annoying and required some tidying up (moving messages, deleting empty accounts, etc.).
- I haven't tried to import recently, but I hope the process is a bit more smooth when I commit to moving my mail from Opera 12 to Vivaldi stable
Now onto the newly possible Thunderbird import. I only tried this yesterday for the first time (my wife's account) so this list is shorter for now:
- It successfully imported most, but not all, of the mail AFAICS.
- It did not import messages for an account which has never been used in Thunderbird but which was itself a dead account imported from Opera 12 back in the day. I will need to search for these messages and if they're not in there find a way to get them imported.
- I have not been able to get Yahoo! and GMail accounts to connect after the import - the settings are correct AFAICS except for getting OAuth to work in outbound settings. OAuth setting disappeared after filling in passwords. The more I fiddled with the server settings the more broken it got - now all the settings for those accounts are greyed out and can't be edited! Hotmail accounts were the only ones I got working.
- When I have time, I might try setting up new accounts to see if Vivaldi automagically gets the right settings, and if successful try to transfer the messages across and delete the broken accounts or otherwise try to copy the server settings across.
Finally - I still don't understand why there isn't an option to simply import messages from raw MBOX text files... it would make import/export of mail a lot easier than getting frustrated with broken mailer-based importing!
I'm interested to hear if anyone has any other tips or problems on importing mail...
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@mossman said:
Finally - I still don't understand why there isn't an option to simply import messages from raw MBOX text files...
I was hoping, that in the meantime this is possible, but (like you described) I wait, until this is done. Importing two files per account (inbox/sent) is much more easier than everything else
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@mossman Thank you very much!
I'm too cowardly for this... i'm gonna stay with TB still, at least for now.
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@derday said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
@mossman said:
Finally - I still don't understand why there isn't an option to simply import messages from raw MBOX text files...
I was hoping, that in the meantime this is possible, but (like you described) I wait, until this is done. Importing two files per account (inbox/sent) is much more easier than everything else
I admit I didn't actually look for this option recently, but as far as I know it hasn't been added yet.
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@guigirl said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
@mossman Thank you very much!
I'm too cowardly for this... i'm gonna stay with TB still, at least for now.
After I posted I noticed someone mentioned a recent bug about settings issues when adding mail accounts in the current snapshot - which might mean the Thunderbird import worked fine and my connection issues are the other known bug.
So if that's fixed soon then you might be okay to have a go. My only other issue was the messages from the closed mail account - maybe Vivaldi only imports active accounts (so there might be a workaround) or maybe the messages have been imported even though the account itself isn't listed - I'll have to spend a couple more hours investigating.
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@mossman Again, thanks! To channel Meryl, for the time being i shall just "sit tight & assess"
Tbh, here's my various concerns re this process:
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anxiety that some/many of my historic emails might become corrupted during this long painful multi-hour process, but that if i happen to only check the "wrong" ones, i might falsely conclude that all went well, until potentially months/years in the future when my belated discovery would be far too late.
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anxiety that some/many of my historic emails might fail to import, with the identical future delayed-discovery hazard as the preceding item
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some peeps might dislike me uttering these words, but fwiw here goes anyway. Though i've been a V user from the beginning, & specifically a Snappie user since soon after we got the different streams, my feeling [right or wrong] is that lately in particular Snappies seem to be having a "bit of a rough trot" re bugginess. I rely implicitly every day on the availability & integrity of all my PIM data, & the possibility of losing access to it on occasions when V is not playing nice, is terribly disturbing to me. Say what one might about Thunderbird, for me at least it has been rock solid over the long term. On days/weeks when V [browser only i mean here atm] is misbehaving, i can always jump onto FF Nightly [as i have been doing back & forth over recent years]. Once/if my PIM data is also inside V, i no longer have that escape route... & that rather scares me.
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the discussion here seems to have focused only on emails afaict, but i have deliberately said "PIM" data, because alongside 2 decades of TB emails, are my copious TB Calendar, Tasks & Contacts data. It must ALL be importable to V, not just emails, otherwise the whole point is defeated, for me.
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@guigirl I share your concerns - which is why I'm still only tinkering with test snapshots for now. I'll certainly be making a copy of the Opera and Thunderbird databases before I switch them off, just in case.
From experience I can say that the mailer itself is working great. My daily work laptop has a snapshot with IMAP connections to all my accounts and it's fine. I think keyboard use of the UI needs improvement when reading feeds (have to keep pressing F7 then F9 to get focus back on the list of articles) but it's functionally complete. Haven't really played with filtering - which I know will be important to you - but what I tried worked as expected.
My desktop snapshot seems to have imported all my old Opera mail, and as I say the Thunderbird import seems to have worked for all active accounts, but I'll be doing another import test and counting/viewing messages before I commit to switching over for good (I was waiting to see if mail would come out of beta any time soon).
Regarding calendars, I never use these in Vivaldi (local phone calendar for personal stuff and forced to use Outlook for work), but they seem to get most of the attention in the changelogs so I suppose this will be working perfectly before officially releasing mail to the general users. I don't know if these will be imported from Thunderbird automatically but I believe there are other import options.
I think contacts were imported from Opera, didn't check Thunderbird. Again, I think these can be imported in standard formats anyway.
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@mossman said
I admit I didn't actually look for this option recently, but as far as I know it hasn't been added yet.
before I posted my answer, I checked which options are actual given. To import "O12 Mail" you have to point to the/a custom ini-folder, but you can't add (mbox) files
@guigirl said:
emails might become corrupted during this long painful multi-hour process,
take a look to the actual snappie
[Mail] Prefetching 400k mails takes days (VB-65668)@guigirl said:
It must ALL be importable to V, not just emails, otherwise the whole point is defeated, for me.
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@derday said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
take a look to the actual snappie
[Mail] Prefetching 400k mails takes days (VB-65668)That's about synchronising with a server, not importing from local files...
It's still not fast - if I recall correctly it took a couple of hours for 60000 messages on this 12 year old desktop PC - but it shouldn't be days.
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@mossman
oh, thanks for clarification -
I've made similar experience, although I miss a whole bunch of messages from both thunderbird (VB-85923) and m2 (VB-82314 - import fails most likely when certain headers are missing / for catchall-addresses, and possibly with certain characters? Maybe it needs some better investigation from our side, but I was never asked to provide example headers or messages, and possibly it's just that messages sent to different accounts cannot be parsed by the system correctly. Or maybe this is due to name collisions and import stopping afterwards - I've found one message where the five digits were given to two different messages on the same day.).
Like you, I had ghost accounts with M2 imports (in the very beginning) and also with my local account from TB (import for local accounts seems to be disabled with todays snapshot), and now I'm just trying to enter all mails into an offline thunderbird account and test whether vivaldi will accept it.
I think that.emlimport would be nicer and easier thanmbox, but tbh I don't mind either as long as it works.arch linux. swaywm. vivaldi-snapshot. m3.
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@mossman said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
I think contacts were imported from Opera, didn't check Thunderbird. Again, I think these can be imported in standard formats anyway.
I had another look - I think contacts are created during indexing of the mail messages rather than by importing from the mailer... my wife's snapshot now has about a dozen different contacts for me based on various mail addresses and "from" names used over the years.
Also, my own snapshot seems to only have a handful of contacts and not the dozens I know are stored in Opera. I might have cleared them all after import last year if it was the same kind of duplicates mess as my wife now has - don't remember any more.
In any case there doesn't seem to be an option just to import contacts - not good. Calendar yes, feeds yes, contacts no.
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That should be correct. I believe that carddav support (and sync) will come at some point as well, not sure if importing contacts from M2 will be too important then, but it's certainly possible.
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@jumpsq said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
I think that
.emlimport would be nicer and easier thanmbox, but tbh I don't mind either as long as it works.I might be wrong but I think EML, MBOX, MBS are basically the same thing - just the text that the mail server sends to your mail program (so it's actually readable by humans, unlike e.g. Outlook files). The only difference is that some files contain single messages and some are concatenated into multiple messages.
Digging around just now I see that the main Thunderbird files are also concatenated plain text files. I just took a look at the messages from my wife's missing account.
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I believe that
mboxcan be compacted / compressed, but I did not read the standard and I may be wrong. -
@jumpsq said in Import experiences from Opera 12 and Thunderbird:
I miss a whole bunch of messages from both thunderbird (VB-85923) and m2 (VB-82314 - import fails most likely when certain headers are missing / for catchall-addresses, and possibly with certain characters? Maybe it needs some better investigation from our side
Now I'm starting to dig around in more detail, I'm finding some oddities - in my wife's "missing" Thunderbird account a message from myself caught my eye - so I went to see if I could find it in Vivaldi. Could not see it in sent mail on that date, could not find it by searching. It did turn up in my old mail account... under "imported unknown folder"... as a blank message. But then when I "view raw message" I can see the same content as in my wife's Thunderbird file. Hmmm... at least the mail was imported even if I can't find it or view it!
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@mossman uh yes, those folders.
Since local folder import from TB had some unintended consequences (showing new folders above All Messages that were not associated with any account), I have just now tried to follow this advice and reindex everything. It seems that now all my RSS subscriptions are still shown in settings but not in the RSS or Mail panels, and that the number of messages indexed is just reduced significantly. At least the number of received and sent messages does not quite sum up to the output of
find ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot/Default/Mail/ -type f | wc, even taking the feed messages aside.potentially interesting observations, I hope @gmg @ltgorm
// ah, and yes, some draft messages disappeared, as well as some labels. I guess I better just use my backup or re-setup it all together.
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Okay, trying again to import my wife's Thunderbird mail since the last snapshots seemed to have some improvements...
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I like that the import status is a bit more detailed now in the pop-up box (which you have to keep reopening by going to the import menu)
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It still doesn't import the messages for the offline account in Thunderbird
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The account settings are still screwed up, don't work and can't be edited to fix
On the last point, I'm afraid I have to say that the settings page is not working well at all! E.g. I know that a Yahoo! account uses POP3 and OAUTH in Thunderbird, yet there is no way to select OAUTH for POP3 - I tried creating a new account to test and I can get it to work with IMAP but not POP3. Furthermore, once the accounts are created almost all the settings are greyed out and can't be edited any more.
Even when I managed to get OAUTH pop-ups for the Thunderbird GMail accounts to be filled in, the account settings still end up all greyed out with a message "outgoing server information missing".
I tried replacing all the outgoing servers with Vivaldi's SMTP server, which worked for Hotmail accounts. The Yahoo! account is still stuck as "POP server did not reply to PASS".
I think GMail is now working after I added the Vivaldi SMTP server and managed to catch the OAUTH pop-ups (these often appeared when I didn't have the password to hand and disappeared when I went to look for it).
Conclusion - interacting with the settings UI is still a confusing pain in the backside with options disappearing or greying out all the time. I think I'm at the point where if I can find a way to enable OAUTH for the Yahoo! account I might have them all working at last.
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@mossman Despite all that - it's back to the same as before - Hotmail works, Yahoo! (OAUTH option missing) and GMail (all settings greyed out and can't be edited, SMTP details gone) don't...
