3

Have just upgraded from Jammy to Ubuntu 24.04.1 and Thunderbird can't seem to find my old profile. It looks as if the original profile has been copied into the snap/Thunderbird directory, but when I run Thunderbird it asks me to set up my accounts from scratch. Other questions on this issue do not provide sufficient info for me to work out how to fix it. Can someone help, please?

tomfilery
  • 101

4 Answers4

1

Ok, so I've now sorted it out. Thanks for all the help - well, actually only graham, who at least gave me a clue as to where to look! I had tried simply copying my original profile contents to the new profile (for the snap version of Thunderbird), but this didn't work at all. Nor did using "import profile" in the "tools" section of Thunderbird. What did finally work was that I created a new profile in the snap version and then copied the contents of my original (non-snap) profile into the new profile, telling it to "merge" the contents of all directories. Once that had completed, I restarted Thunderbird and it restored all my messages, etc. Posted in case it is of use to anyone else.

tomfilery
  • 101
1

my migration from TB (apt -> snap) did not succeeded during upgrade from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 : because network was offline and download was not not possible... as already known :-( After (successful) upgrade, installation in "App Center" of TB did run well: but import of apt profile failed because my user partition was out of space, the App itself did NOT displayed this major problem for me !!!

I had tried simply copying my original profile contents to the new profile (for the snap version of Thunderbird)

Solution above failed also : I moved my emails like described, but merge op and editing of profile.ini was not enough. Error with calendar...

After running "snap install thunderbird" from console, I got the "out-space" error. After freeing space, I re-installed snap TB package. First run of TB do import automatically the apt profile and emails without problem. => try also this version 128.5.1 :-)

user@lenovo:~$ snap remove --purge thunderbird
thunderbird removed
user@lenovo:~$ snap install thunderbird
thunderbird 128.5.1esr-1 from Canonical✓ installed
user@lenovo:~$ thunderbird
Importing existing thunderbird profiles from /home/user/.thunderbird
Found default profile: h5spasas.default
Import done in 338.178 s (9 GB)
JeannotDalsace
  • 11
1

Another little "gotcha" to be aware of. When I upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 and (hence) Thunderbird snap the majority of my messages "disappeared". I have a special account (Thunderbird's term) called 'Local Folders' which not associated with any identity. This is where I store the vast majority of my emails. It is "outside"" of my '~/.thunderbird' folder. During the migration Thunderbird updated the Local Directory for this account to be under the '~/snap/thunderbird/...' folder. Once I discovered the issue I updated it to the correct location and all is OK.

AnGus King
  • 11
0

I had basically the same very annoying issue after upgrading from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04.2 today:
Thunderbird refused to start, giving the message

Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.

I quickly figured that Canonical and/or Mozilla must have messed up access to the profile data in its wonderful forced migration from apt-based to snap-based installation of Thunderbird.
The answers and comments given here partially helped me sorting this out.

Looks like that least part of the reason that automatic migration went wrong was that I had made ~/.thunderbird/ a symlink to some other directory: ~/.mozilla/thunderbird, and for some silly reason the migration did not cope with that.\ After I moved the directory containing profiles.ini and the Profiles folder back to an actual directory ~/.thunderbird/ and re-installed Thunderbird (sudo snap remove --purge thunderbird && sudo snap install thunderbird),
Thunderbird created on its first run a symlink ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird to ~/.thunderbird/ and then was able to find profiles.ini.
Still Thunderbird did not properly recognize all the profiles in the Profiles folder but just one of them.
After manually re-adding via the profile manager the info where to find my main profile, Thunderbird found it, but mourned:

Your Thunderbird Profile contains inconsistent or corrupted OpenPGP data. You have secret keys that were previously protected with an automatic passphrase, but file encrypted-openpgp-passphrase.txt is missing. File /run/user/1000/doc/1c740e62/david.default/secring.gpg that contains your secret keys cannot be accessed. You must manually repair this corruption by moving the file to a different folder. Then restart, then import your secret keys from a backup. The OpenPGP functionality will be disabled until repaired.

Moreover, it could not access the directories containing the local mail contents. What I then tried was to replace in prefs.js all occurrences of .mozilla/thunderbird by .thunderbird and to manually add a symlink from /run/user/1000/.thunderbird to ~/.thunderbird.
Yet then for whatever weird reason, many bogus mail folder file with names like Sent-1, Drafts-2 and Inbox-3 appeared in all my mail accounts, and on further restarts of Thunderbird, partly due to crashes, all the local mail files in the ImapMail sub-folder got removed, renamed, or otherwise corrupted. WTF.

What did the trick in the end was:

  • exit Thunderbird
  • move the original ~/.thunderbird to ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird
  • in each profile, update all directory references in pref.js accordingly
  • restore the mail folder files from a backup as far as possible
  • re-start Thunderbird, which then updates/re-fills the mail folder files via IMAP
dvo
  • 111