I Need The Help of an Opera Mail Specialist / Developer

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

I created today a big problem for myself and family in Opera Mail (1.0, latest version).
I am looking for an Opera Mail specialist (developer) who has the commitment, engagement and determination to help resolve this problem.
The reason I’m focused on an optimal email client has developed over the past year after I learned that I have lung cancer and started using mail more and more to keep in touch with family and friends to discuss feelings and thoughts.
Last week we have been informed that I am incurable and that the end is only months away. This may have contributed to the fact that I obviously made a stupid mistake causing opera mail to misbehave.
Opera mail has lost all correct mail account information
Opera mail has lost all mail history (going back to the year 2000 or so)
We are missing most all the mails coming from friends and family to support myself, my wife and children from the last year.
I hope that via this forum I can find someone who has the interest and the technical abilities to help us restore opera mail in its old glory (it may not be an easy case I am afraid).
I would do everything to support you and provide the necessary information, files etc. that could be of use to resolve the issue.
My wife and myself would be very happy and very grateful if we could find someone who would be able to help us.
Please get in touch with me and I will be more than willing to describe the problem and what lead to the problem immediately.
Thanks for your consideration,
Thomas

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Burnout is more the specialist around here, but what actually happened last week that caused the issue? Also, were your mail accounts regular mail (POP3) or IMAP? IMAP expects to store messages on the server forever, so if you recreate an IMAP account you should still have the messages. With a POP3 account, if the messages are no longer on your computer you may not be able to get them back.

I suppose I also need to say, there was an update to Opera Mail a couple of months ago - though only for Windows. If you still have 1.0.1040 you may want to update to 1.0.1044. Not that it'll solve your issue, but just to be up to date.

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

thanks a lot sgunhouse for your reply. Well I guess at least some of the older mail files are from POP3 accounts. The newer mails are from IMAP accounts however there are only around 150 or so left on the mail server. I was hoping that the mail database on my computer could somehow be recovered in order to get back all mails or at least mails going back two years or so. I guess that would help my wife a lot whe I'm gone.
What happened is that a copied some files to a different location in order to work on them - my thought was I copy them somewhere and make sure I can copy them back and nothing should happen to them as I can copy them back. However when I put all files back in their old place and restarted opera mail, opera mail wanted to create new mail accounts..... and so I started to recognize that somehow my mail database was also corrupted. I'm talking about the mail database on my computer with all my emails since the start of using emails. Thanks for mentioning it but I was already using 1.0.1044.
So maybe there is someone who can help recover the mail database that was going back years on my computer?
Best regards
Thomas

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer last edited by

Goto "Menu -> Help -> about Opera Mail" and take note of the mail folder location and the preferences location.

Goto "Menu -> settings -> import and export -> export contact list" and save it as contacts.adr. Also export your feeds list if you have any feeds.

In "Menu -> mail and chat accounts", edit each account and take note of the server settings if you don't remember them. Also, make sure you know your mail passwords.

Close down Opera Mail, browse to the mail folder location and rename the "mail" folder to "mailold". Also browse to the preferences folder and rename wand.dat, contacts.adr, operaprefs.ini and opcert6.dat. Note that if you can't find the folders, they might be hidden. In windows explorer, goto "tools -> folders options -> view" and choose to show hidden files and folders. Also, unhceck "hide extensions for known file types". If you don't see the menu bar in windows explorer, hold down the alt key to make it temporarily appear.

Start Opera Mail up and create all your IMAP accounts again. Do not import anything.

Then, create all your POP accounts again. Do not import anything.

Then, for each of your POP accounts only, goto "Menu -> settings -> import and export -> import mail -> import generic mbox" -> add folder". You want to point it to the "mailold/store/accountN" folder where N is the number for the account as seen in "mailold/acocunts.ini". Once the folder is chosen, you're going to set the "import into" drop-down to the corresponding POP account in your new setup.

(To make it easier to import the right folder for each account), you can look at mailold/accounts.ini to see what order your accounts were created in and recreate them in that order in the new setup.)

That will get you all your POP messages back. For POP messages that are still on the server, you'll duplicates. For these, you'll want to delete the read, imported copy of each of those duplicates and keep the unread, newly-fetched-from-server copy.

Now, as for old IMAP messages that are no longer on the server, they should be gone on your hard drive also. But, you can try importing the store/accountN folder for an IMAP account and set it "Import into" to a new account (it'll be a POP account without server settings pretty much). Then, you can look to see if any of your missing messages are in there and if they have their bodies. If so, you can use the you@example.com access points in the mail panel to drag messages from the POP account to the "Inbox" IMAP folder view of the corresponding IMAP account to upload those messages back to the IMAP server.

Then, import your contacts, import your feeds list and readjust any mail settings.

That should give you a fresh, non-buggy Opera Mail where all your messages are shown in Opera.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

If you look in your Opera mail folder, you should find a folder called "Store".
In the account folders in there should be all your messages, stored as .mbs files.
If there are a large number there it's likely that your messages database is still OK, it's just that Opera can't access it because your accounts.ini file maybe got corrupted somehow and Opera re-created it.
You can open the .mbs files with Notepad and get a clue as to their contents.
I would get hold of a free undelete program (the free version of Recuva is pretty good in my experience) and see if you can recover an earlier version of accounts.ini from before the problem occurred. Putting that in place of the existing one may just fix it if the database is in fact still intact.
As with all recovery systems, it depends on whether the file has been subsequently overwritten or not, so good luck!

EDIT: burnout426 posted his reply while I was typing mine. Try his suggestions first!

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

burnout 426 - thanks a lot for all your input and suggestions I will try them for sure.
Davehawley - Got some pretty good input from you as well. I will try whatever is going to work.

Another point came up when I was reading your posts. I had the mail system set up on a separate non system drive to make the mail accessible for different family members - all using the same settings, databases mail files etc.
So when I messed it was there.
The next time I restarted opera mail it wanted to create accounts and I started to - but maybe opera mail uses a kind of standard location to do that that is different from my special drive location for all users and hence there maybe more that can be recovered, because it has not been overwritten (in the standard mail location), maybe maybe maybe. I will keep working on it and looking for solutions, my first success at the moment is that I got about 100 mails from the last weeks back - these are IMAP mails that are still on the mail server.
Could I please ask you (burnout426 and Davehawley) to keep an eye on this topic in order to help me in the future during my attempts to repair the mail system.
I thank everybody for their input.
Regards Thomas

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Will do Thomas, I've put a star on the topic so I should be notified of any additions.

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

Perfect davehawley. I had a good look at the files in my opera file system.
I found that I have the following file system structure:

In my mail folder modified In my Store Folder
signature7.txt 10.04.2016 folder account2 with sub-folders 2000-2013 obviously year folders, with month sub-folders
signature6.txt 10.04.2016 folder account3 with sub-folder 2013 in the month sub-folders folders for day's
signature5.txt 10.04.2016 folder account4 with sub-folder 2013-2016
signature2.txt 28.10.2010 folder account5 with sub-folder 2016
recovery.log 09.05.2012 folder account6 with sub-folder 2013-2016
opr7848.tmp 10.01.2015 folder draft
opr96D8.tmp 20.01.2016 ultimately in the day folders little xx.mbs files exist sometimes oneopr2AF9.tmp 15.06.2014 sometime a view and some times quiet a lot, the size also varies
omailbase.dat 11.04.2016 from a view KB to say 200 KB (but all together this most be a lot of
index.ini 11.04.2016 data. However the content of the xx.mbs files does not really look like
incoming6.txt 11.04.2016 email text etc.
imp.dat 10.04.2016 With the info I have from burnout426 and davehawley I'm not sure I know what to do now
accounts.ini 11.04.2016 So many possible xx.mbs files and a strange file system.
folder store 10.04.2016 It looks as if my mail organized itselfe by the day it was in use.
folder pop3 10.04.2016 The accounts I'm not sure at least some may be from the upgrade from integrated
folder lexicon 11.04.2016 opera mail to opera mail 1.0. But it may also be that I added more with upgrade
folder indexer 11.04.2016 to Win10? I am definitely not able to determine the order in which
folder imap 11.04.2016 the accounts have been created for the recovery/recreation process (burnout426).
folder autofilter 09.04.2016 I'm not sure what to do with the large amount of xx.mbs files and the file system used
folder Account Backup 02.12.2013 store these files. I also tried Recuva and that could restore even more xx.mbs files
and other file types

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

Forget my last post formating has been lost.
I try again in chunks.

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

Perfect davehawley. I had a good look at the files in my opera file system.
I found that I have the following file system structure:

In my mail folder modified
signature7.txt 10.04.2016
signature6.txt 10.04.2016
signature5.txt 10.04.2016
signature2.txt 28.10.2010
recovery.log 09.05.2012
opr7848.tmp 10.01.2015
opr96D8.tmp 20.01.2016
oneopr2AF9.tmp 15.06.2014
omailbase.dat 11.04.2016
index.ini 11.04.2016
incoming6.txt 11.04.2016
imp.dat 10.04.2016

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

again not good but we are getting there: Perfect davehawley. I had a good look at the files in my opera file system. I found that I have the following file system structure: In my mail folder signature7.txt modified 10.04.2016; signature6.txt modified 10.04.2016; signature5.txt modified 10.04.2016 ; signature2.txt modified 28.10.2010; recovery.log modified 09.05.2012 ; opr7848.tmp modified 10.01.2015 ; opr7848.tmp modified 10.01.2015 ; opr96D8.tmp modified 0.01.2016 ; oneopr2AF9.tmp modified 15.06.2014 ; omailbase.dat modified 11.04.2016 ; index.ini modified 11.04.2016 ; incoming6.txt modified 11.04.2016 imp.dat modified 10.04.2016;

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

Further: In my Store Folder are folder account2 with sub-folders 2000-2013 obviously year folders, with month sub-folders and folder account3 with sub-folder 2013 and month sub-folders with sub-folders for day's folder account4 with sub-folder 2013-2016; folder account5 with sub-folder 2016 ; folder account6 with sub-folder 2013-2016 ; folder draft ; ultimately in the day folders little xx.mbs files exist sometimes, sometime a view and some times quiet a lot, the size also varies from a view KB to say 200 KB (but all together this most be a lot of data. However the content of the xx.mbs files does not really look like email text etc. With the info I have from burnout426 and davehawley I'm not sure I know what to do now.

So many possible xx.mbs files and a strange file system.It looks as if my mail organized itselfe by the day it was in use.
The accounts I'm not sure at least some may be from the upgrade from integrated opera mail to opera mail 1.0. But it may also be that I added more with upgrade to Win10? I am definitely not able to determine the order in which he accounts have been created for the recovery/recreation process (burnout426). I'm not sure what to do with the large amount of xx.mbs files and the file system used store these files. I also tried Recuva and that could restore even more xx.mbs files
and other file types

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

The contents of the .mbs files should be identifiable as being e-mail messages.
They are in plain text.
The fact that you have a lot of them and they are in folders which go back to 200 would seem to indicate that your mail database is probably still intact, you just can't access it.
Did you try the import that burnout426 suggested?
Did Recuva find any accounts.ini or index.ini files from before the problem occurred?

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Where does Mail say your mail directory is? If Mail is just pointing to the wrong location, then we should be able to edit operaprefs.ini to change it to the right location. Only edit files while the program is closed though.

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer last edited by

If you renamed operaprefs.ini as I suggested, it'll remove your custom mail folder location. While Opera is closed, under the [Mail] section (add it if it isn't there), add the line:

Mail Root Directory=path to "mail" folder

Then it'll use your custom mail folder location. Before you start Opera, you can then move the good mail folder to that spot so that Opera will use it (moving the old one out of the way first.).

I only suggested renaming operaprefs.ini for the purpose of making Opera use the default location of the mail folder. Didn't know you had a custom location.

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

As far as the forum goes, it supports Markdown. You can see the link at the bottom of the page if you like ... or for formatted text add 4 spaces at the start of each line. Some versions also support tables using the vertical bar character, but I've never tested it here.

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer last edited by

https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/wiki/m2tips/mail_folder_structure should help you understand what each file/folder is for in the mail folder. You don't have to worry about incomingN.txt or anything like that.

Also, after fixing the mail folder location in operaprefs.ini, you can try the whole import process again if you want. Just rename the "mail" folder again (but to "mailold2" for example) and import from the original "mailold" folder per my directions.

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

all of you thanks a lot but I'm a bit slow in this.
burnout426; already figuring out old and new mail accounts and preferences etc. seems difficult.
In About Opera Mail I can see:
Preferences are at root:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Opera Mail\OperaMail1_0\operaprefs.ini.
If I remember correct this is not a custom location I created when using original opera mail 1.0 but is the standard for a new installation (or start of a session in my case. But I'm not sure about this.
Saved session
C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\Opera Mail\OperaMail1_0\sessions\autopera.win
Given the location same thing as in case above.
Mail directory is given as
J:\OperaMail1_0\All User Mail\mail. This seems to be the latest used custom location. But it has no operaprefs.ini but has a operaprefs_default.ini and it has no autopera.win what so ever. I have set file explorer to show all files.
And then we also have the J:\OperaMail\AllUsers\Mail folder I think again a custom folder used for opera mail before opera mail 1.0 - but I'm not sure.
My confusion is where to start etc.
One other question: when you say "edit" you mean just give it a different name? I'm not sure here.
Again thanks a lot don't think I'm not working on it - I do but most days I am 50% of the time in hospital mostly for radiation. I try to do my best but speed is not up to a 100% and the amount of data is also not helping. I get a better idea with all info I getr from you but still I miss some pieces. I will work on it as much as possibe and may some has some more directions concerning the locations recoveries imports etc.
Thanks Thomas

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer last edited by admin

(There's a simple way at the bottom if you don't want to try the following things)

Mail directory is given as
J:\OperaMail10\All User Mail\mail. This seems to be the latest used custom location. But it has no operaprefs.ini but has a operaprefsdefault.ini

operaprefs_default.ini is a file that sits next to operamail.exe. operaprefs_default.ini isn't something you normally mess with. operaprefs.ini is.

I need to know a few things for to make sure how you have things set up:

• Open operaprefs_default.ini with notepad.

Is there a "[System]" section?

If so, is there a "Multi User=" line?

If so, is it set to 0 or 1?

• Where is operamail.exe and operaprefs_default.ini?

Are they in "J:\OperaMail10" or "J:\OperaMail10\All User Mail"?

• In the folder where operamail.exe and operaprefs_default.ini are at, is the a folder named "profile"?

I'm trying to determine whether you have what's called a standalone installation of Opera Mail at "J:\OperaMail10" or if you did a normal installation to "J:\OperaMail10" where operamail uses the local and roaming appdata folders on the root drive (as opposed to the "profile" folder next to operamail.exe) where you then changed the mail folder location to "J:\OperaMail10\All Users Mail\mail" in "root:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Opera Mail\OperaMail10\operaprefs.ini.

Was also wondering if your intention was to have all of Opera Mail on the J drive or just the mail folder or just the mail folder and other profile files.

When I mention "rename" for a file or folder, I mean to right-click on the folder, choose "rename" and type the new name. It can also be done by pressing F2 on a folder or file and typing the new name.

When I mention "edit" for editing a file, I mean to open the file in a text editor like notepad for example. Right-click -> open with -> notepad for example.

What I would do is this:

• Goto http://www.opera.com/computer/mail and download the Opera Mail installer.

• Launch it.

• Click "options".

• Set "install path" to "root:\Program Files (x86)\Opera Mail".

• Set "install for" to "All users".

• Check "Make Opera default" if given the option.

• Install.

• Open Opera Mail.

• Close Opera Mail.

• Goto "root:\Users\your_user_name\AppData\Roaming\Opera Mail\Opera Mail" and open operaprefs.ini with a text editor.

• Under [Mail] (add the section if it's not there) add the line:

  Mail Root Directory=J:\Opera Mail\mail

and save.

• Then, launch Opera Mail (right-click on the Opera Mail shortcut, goto properties and make sure the path to Opera Mail is "root:\Program Files (x86)\Opera Mail\operamail.exe" first) and create your accounts and import like mentioned here. You'll just need to import from the mail folder you had before all of this.

That will install Opera Mail properly where the program files and profile are on the root driver, but the mail files are in "J:\Opera Mail\mail". (Contacts.adr and wand.dat will still be on root at "root:\Users\your_user_name\AppData\Roaming\Opera Mail\Opera Mail".

Or, skip all that and do this simple way:

If you want all of Opera Mail on the J drive, just launch the installer, click "options", set "install path" to "J:\Opera Mail", set "install for" to "Standalone Installation" and install. Once Opera Mail starts up, set up your accounts and import as mentioned in here.

Then, create a shortcut to "J:\Opera Mail\operamail.exe" and put it on your desktop. Then, all of Opera Mail will be on your J drive and everything will be restored.

[tomskii9918]

tomskii9918 last edited by

Hello burnout426 you are helping me so much:

Open operaprefs_default.ini with notepad looks like this:
Opera Preferences version 2.1
; Do not edit this file while Opera is running
; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding

[System]
Opera Product=0

[User Prefs]
Language Files Directory={Resources}locale\en
Language File={Resources}locale\en\en.lng

[Auto Update]
Country Code=NL

and is located at J:\OperaMail1_0.

In the folder where operamail.exe and operaprefs_default.ini are at, is the a folder named "profile"? No there is no folder profile whatsoever in J:\OperaMail1_0.

If I could get opera mail up and running again for POP and IMAP in a multiuser mode it would be great. If I could access (large parts)of the old maildata base in a multiuser setting it would be fantastic. If someone could help me wit setting that up from what is left on my computer would make me very happy.