Preface: I used Opera for a week while I tried to figure out why FF crashed on me all of a sudden. I also used the built-in email client for Opera, which downloaded all my email to my hard drive.

When I was finally able to fix FF and wanted to go back to FF & Thunderbird for web/email, I was faced with a problem - Thunderbird can only import email from Outlook, Eudora, Communcator, and Outlook Express.

After doing a little digging on Google, and using the old noodle, this is what I came up with, and it worked a treat :D

===== WARNING: BACKING UP YOUR EXISTING EMAIL (IF YOU HAVE ANY) IS A VERY GOOD IDEA. I CANNOT GUARANTEE THIS WILL WORK FLAWLESSLY FOR YOU =====

Opera Version: 9.02
Thunderbird Version: 1.02
I also want to add that in Opera I had my email filtered by address, which made this very easy for me to import the right emails to the right address within Thunderbird.

In addition, I had only one profile in Thunderbird.

Lastly, I already had the email accounts set up in Thunderbird that I wanted to import emails for before starting this process.

1. For each filter, right-click on the name and select "Export". Save the .mbs file to a folder on your computer.
1a. Copy the .mbs file (Click on the file and then Ctrl+C) [This part is optional but made things go faster for me]

2. Navigate to C:/Documents & Settings /<user name>/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile name>/Mail (where <user name> is the username for your windows login, and <profile name> is the profile name in Thunderbird)

3. Find the email account folder you're importing to, eg mail.something.com and go to the "Inbox" folder

4. Create a folder with .sbd as the suffix (eg, importedmails.sbd)

5. [Copy/]Paste the .mbs file and rename to filename.msf (eg, importedmails.msf)

6. [Copy/]Paste the .mbs file again and rename to filename (no file extension, eg importedmails)

It's important that in steps 4,5, and 6 you use the same name for all 3. So if you start with funstuff.mbs, you should have funstuff.msf, funstuff.sbd, and funstuff in the same folder when you're done.

I hope this helps someone else looking to import their emails from Opera to Thunderbird :)

Very good info.......I hope someone makes use of it :)

Thank you my friend :)

I had to do this a few months ago when I started to get sick of Opera's email program. I am sure a lot of people will find your tutorial useful. :)

OH, yeah if anyone is out there don't upgrade to Netscape 8.0 b/c it isn't an e-mail client. I have know people to upgrade to this thinking they could import their address book and they lost everything with the upgrade. FYI.

thanks for that info, it could be useful one day, there's no problem with my email on Opera 9.10 , beside I just use an gmail as a POP 3 mail :) and the original mail still exist on my inbox :)

So many businesses are running on gmail. It's the office pop3 upgrade and widely used by many people in/out of business.:cool:

Thanks for the tip. I've always been a Mozilla user but I can't help but to explore once in a while using other browsers just to get a load of how other browser works.

Does this info still apply? Can this be done with any web-mail system, like gmail or AOL? I have a whole bunch of emails on my private AOL account and I would like to download them to my local drive.

Does this info still apply? Can this be done with any web-mail system, like gmail or AOL? I have a whole bunch of emails on my private AOL account and I would like to download them to my local drive.

Yes I know because I just spent the last 2 hours looking for it. AOL is better for it than gmail since gmail tends to block accounts for over-activity but AOL tends to be more liberal.

Thanks for the detailed information..