Exporting mail from Opera’s M2 email client and Importing to Thunderbird

This is brief guide to Exporting email from Opera’s M2 client and importing into Thunderbird, this guide assumes you’re running on a windows system (XP for this example).

A nice Slovakian chap named Vello emailed me to ask if I had any idea how to do this. As it happens, when I was switching from Opera to Firefox I had cause to do exactly this – rather than keep the (admittedly rather nice) M2 client for my email, I decided to have a go with Thunderbird – the companion email client to Firefox.

Thunderbird only has an import function from set clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Communicator 4.x), and has no generic function for importing just ‘Mail’. I had seen rumour that using Eudora as a go-between with Opera and Thunderbird would work, but it sounded convoluted. Turns out it’s much more simple than that.

Disclaimer: This may not work in your setup. It was tested under Windows XP, Opera 9 & Thunderbird 1.5. Even with this setup there is a small chance you could lose your email, if this happens, it’s not my fault
Always make a backup of important things, mails, etc, before fiddling with your system, and make sure to backup the mbs files you export from opera

So…you have folders you would like to export from opera. I will use 3 folder for this example. 2 are standard Opera folders: “Received” + “Sent”. One will be a custom folder: “Work” (you may not have custom folders, in which case it’s even easier).

• First you export the folders you want from Opera (Right-click->Export), which will give you 3 files: Received.mbs , Sent.mbs , Work.mbs

These ‘mbs’ files are actually standard Unix mbox files, which are in fact what Thunderbird uses. Stupidly though, its ‘import’ utility is just from other programs, so we have to do this manually.

• Create your new account in Thunderbird…(tools->account settings->Add account)…put in all your settings…make sure you _Un-check_ the ‘Use Global Folders’ option if you want to keep multiple email accounts separate.

If you have a custom folder (‘Work’ in this example), create that now in your new account.

Now you close Thunderbird.

• If doing this on Windows XP, then navigate to folder that is like:
c:/Documents And Settings/YOUR_USER/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/xbsfhafaf.default/Mail/pop.yourPOPserver.com/

In this folder you will see sets of 2 files for each mail folder…there is one with ‘.msf’ extension…this is just the data about the folder.
Then there is one with no extension – this is the actual mails for that ‘mail folder’.

• All we need to do is replace these ‘no extension’ files with our ‘mbs’ files, and rename them properly (keep a backup though . So in my example:

• Delete Inbox (no extension) —–> copy+paste ‘Received.mbs’ into folder —-> Rename to ‘Inbox’
• Delete Sent (no extension) —–> copy+paste ‘Sent.mbs’ into folder —-> Rename to ‘Sent’
• Delete Work (no extension) —–> copy+paste ‘Work.mbs’ into folder —-> Rename to ‘Work’

Now open Thunderbird, and all your mail should appear. Hurrah! for Tom you cry in wonderment.

It may all look ‘unread’…so quickly ‘right-click -> Mark folder as read’ if you want to correct that.

This should hopefully have worked. If there’s any bits that don’t, send me details of your setup and what went wrong (tom_walsham AT yahoo DOT com – assuming your email still works , and I can modify these instructions accordingly.

Related posts:

1. Migrating from Opera to Firefox (part 2)
2. Migrating from Opera to Firefox (Part 1)

Tags: browsers, Email, Mozilla, Opera, Thunderbird