Importing mail from Opera to Thunderbird

I finally decided to make the switch from Opera's M2 mail client to Thunderbird. The reason for the change was primary that the anti-spam combination Opera and Spamahilator was not working that well anymore, and I thought that it would be better to use a single program that handles both emails and spam detection.
Thunderbird has a great working junk filter that seems to handle spam really well even after just a few days of working with the program.
Importing mail from Opera to Thunderbird was not that easy. Thunderbird's imports feature is only working for imports from Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Communicator which meant I had to find a way to import the mails manually.
To do that I had to first export the mail using Opera's mail client which thankfully is easy: right click a mailbox, select export and save the file. I did that to my received and my sent items folder but you can do this as well for the trash for instance or other folders.
The files have the extension .mbs and not very surprisingly Thunderbird uses this format as well to store mails. What you will have to do now is to create at least one email account in Thunderbird, you do that by clicking on Tools > Account Settings and then Add Account. Once added you see the path to the mails of that account in the account settings tab. I suggest you use one global setting for all accounts instead of different settings for each, this makes it easier to import the mails.
Navigate to the path that is mentioned in the account settings, it is usually something like
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[random].default\Mail\Local Folders
Once there you notice many files in that folder like Inbox, Inbox.msf, Trash, Trash.msf and so forth. We will leave the .msf files unchanged and take a closer look at the files without extension. This is where Thunderbird stores our mails, the only thing we have to do is replace those files with our exported ones from Opera.
Which means that Received.mbs replaces Inbox and Sent.mbs replaces Sent. Do this for all folders that you have, simply remove the extension from custom folders and move them into that dir as well.
Thunderbird will import the mails at the next start and you should see all your mails just like in Opera.
Note that you should do this only with a new account as you will overwrite existing emails otherwise.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!