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Story:

I upgraded from 22.04 gradually to 24.04 in one day. During the upgrade to 24.04 there was the message that Thunderbird would only work as snap from now on. I went with it (no Thunderbird instance was open at the time).

Problem:

Now, when I open Thunderbird, it tells me:

Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To use Thunderbird, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, restart your device, or use a different profile.

Everything works fine, when I specify a different profile with the --profile option.

I deleted path/to/profile/.parentlock and path/to/profile/.lock, but same outcome.

How can I resolve the situation? Does Thunderbird have any option to forcefully clear a previous session?

DarkTrick
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3 Answers3

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I've observed three things that can make that message come up.

  1. Thunderbird is running AND that specific profile is in use

  2. If you don't have write access to that mailbox. Thunderbird does a whole lot of internal work at the root of the mailbox.

  3. As of Ubuntu 24.04 I have had to change how I mount mailboxes. Thunderbird no longer tolerates mailboxes on SAMBA mounted drives.

quill
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1

Just to add to the comment from DarkTrick:

  1. After upgrading from Ubuntu 22.04.3 to 24.04.1 LTS, which changed Thunderbird APT to Thunderbird SNAP, my profile wasn't migrated and ended up with an empty profile. Followed the steps in Updating Thunderbird from apt to snap removed my config got my profile into Thunderbird SNAP.

  2. On starting Thunderbird was then presented with the following error from this question:
    Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To use Thunderbird, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, restart your device, or use a different profile.

  3. The PC in question dual-boots Ubuntu and Windows. For historical reasons, the profiles.ini in Ubuntu has a path to the Thunderbird profile stored on a Windows NTFS partition mounted /mnt/windows. This is from when the Ubuntu and Windows which dual-boot had Thunderbird versions which could share the same Thunderbird profile format. For the past few years the Thunderbird profile had only been accessed by the Ubuntu Thunderbird APT.

  4. After running the following suggested in the comment above, then my Thunderbird profile is usable under Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS:

    sudo snap connect thunderbird:removable-media

  5. The SNAP removable-media interface documentation lists which top-level directories are considered to contain removable media:

    removable-media allows read/write access to mounted removable storage in /media, /run/media and /mnt.

    Access to /mnt requires snapd version 2.36+.

    Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS has snapd version 2.63.1+24.0, which is why enabling the Thunderbird SNAP access to removable media allowed access to the profile under /mnt/windows

Chester Gillon
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0

I had the same issue. It started working after I called 'sudo snap connect thunderbird:removable-media'. The problem was that my profile was stored on a portable drive.

Alexey Bobrick
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