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What is expected as an argument fot the -P option when thunderboard is called as a shell tool?

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A system crash in ubuntu Linux has broken the link between Thunderbird and subdirectories under $HOME/.thunderbird. I need to reconnect for four separate email addresses. The shell tool thunderbird offers a -P control option that is apparently supposed to point to a profile. Is that a file system address? if so which file. If not what do I need?

A system crash in ubuntu Linux has broken the link between Thunderbird and subdirectories under $HOME/.thunderbird. I need to reconnect for four separate email addresses. The shell tool thunderbird offers a -P control option that is apparently supposed to point to a profile. Is that a file system address? if so which file. If not what do I need?

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Helpful, yes. Thank you. Solved the problem no.

I have been using thunderbird to handle 4 separate email addresses for over a year. I was forced to drop Eudora because my service, pair.com, demanded better security. I now have an investment in filters and subdirectories -er- mailboxes files that I would like to preserve. After installing ubuntu 15.04 which caused problems of its own, I find that executing thunderbird has forgotten all of my work and wants to start anew.

Looking at your stuff I worked to find files that are hidden. ls -la commands to my tsch-shell seems to be adequate but I still can't figure out a name that would describe a 4 source Profile file.

I copied and now can read and even edit the contents of /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird.sh which is linked to /usr/bin/thunderbird

It is a bash shell executed with #!/bin/sh as a first line. Then:

  1. Firefox launcher containing a Profile migration helper for
  2. temporary profiles used during alpha and beta phases.
  1. Authors:
  2. Alexander Sack <asac@jwsdot.com>
  3. Fabien Tassin <fta@sofaraway.org>
  4. Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@canonical.com>
  5. Chris Coulson <chris.coulson@canonical.com>

I' not very good at bash but tis no mention of a -P option anywhere. It seems to be nothing more than debugging options. But it is linked to something called "$MOZ_APP_LAUNCHER".

Right now I just need to get thunderbird working the way it did before with all four email addresses filtering messages as I have programmed them. A complete restart will take another year but I can recover the mailboxes as filtered into "local" files but there has to be a better way.

1.38.2.0 build1-0u shows using the ubuntu search. Do I have a problem with currency? I do think that would have been recognized during the install of 15.04 by ubuntu.

Can I get the format of a profile file? Perhaps I could just create one that describes the files.

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On Windows machines, the ' -p' is a switch added to the Windows Run command to enable the Thunderbird Profile Manager. e.g. "thunderbird.exe -p" TB must be shut down beforehand.

Not sure if it translates to ubuntu.

TB-38.2 Win10-PC

corrected a typo

Modified by gild

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My problem persists. I have managed to install thunderbird as an app on another peecee. It's working OK but I have lost a bunch of mail on the other box where I was running thunderbird which refused to use the stored addresses and mail that was filtered into about 15 separate folders.

I have found the mailbox files and committed them to disk but I'm now faced with rewriting the filters that I was using and there are a big bunch of them. I experimented a bit with copying the old filters that show up in the old machine but they don't seem to be paste-able into the new disk space. Yeah, I'm a bit scared of that but I did write a shell script that put all of the old mailboxes onto a 4 GB optical disk.

I did try to persuade thunderbird to "import" data from the old machine. I got nowhere and now think that thunderbird doesn't recognize itself as another mail client.

My problem is "solved" but I'm not happy. I really don't like reworking all of my work with filters created with push buttons and I would really be happy with good old Eudora where I could create my own password header and use it for filtering.

Yeah. I might find time to look at the source code and I might be helpful. But I just had my 80th birthday and my introduction to the internet was by way of ARPAnet. FORTRAN and the Compass assembler are OK by me. I have mastered C and I like perl 5. Perhaps . . . but I'd rather just be able to read my mail without a battle.

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Your troubles with the launcher and that horrible bash script are what motivated me to move away from Ubuntu, along with the ghastly unity interface. In LMDE, Thunderbird is installed into opt/ and the launcher is a regular shortcut to the executable.

Yes, in Linux, -p alone will involve the profile manager. Optionally you can pass it the name of a specific profile, as declared inside profiles.ini. ISTR that with care, you can also pass it the pathname of the required profile's folder.