Thunderbird Community Forum

I am running Fedora 42 KDE spin ("plasma"). The "Discover Software Center" app offers Thunderbird as both a regular and a flatpak install, and I somewhat arbitrarily chose flatpak.

I am dealing with several legacy email accounts that have 20 years of messages, so I need to control where the profile was created, so immediately after installing I ran with -P to create a profile and specified a path name of /lore/jeff/thunderbird. /lore is the mountpoint of /dev/sda2 and it is in my /etc/fstab. /lore/jeff previously existed because that's where I put my Dropbox folder.

Every time I shut down TB and restart it later it always fails because lock and .parentlock are never deleted. Until now, I just dealt with it by deleting the files in bash, but today I wanted to make sure that TB always starts offline and decided that user.js would be the absolute safest way to guarantee that, so I pulled up profiles.ini to get a list of all profile paths to make sure that I put a copy of user.js in each and every one whether it's in use or not. What I discovered is that the profile I created does NOT have a Path of /lore/jeff/thunderbird but instead /run/user/1000/doc/e1a4ab74/thunderbird and not only that but at the very bottom of the file are these three lines [InstallBD520B11F73A6B64] Default=/run/user/1000/doc/e1a4ab74/thunderbird Locked=1

The interesting thing is that when I put user.js into the /run/user... path and then looked at /lore/jeff/thunderbird to check on lock and .parentlock, I see that there is magically a copy of user.js there. I'm not exactly sure what is going on because when I do `ls -ldi` on the two files, their inode numbers are vastly different. I don't know enough about how flatpak operates internally, but my gut tells me it has something to do with it, and my question that I'm finally getting around to asking is if I edit the profiles.ini file to use /lore/jeff/thunderbird in an attempt to get TB to correctly clean up the lock files, is that going to cause a problem because of whatever flatpak is doing? And should I complain to flatpak about it?

Thanks for reading :-)

I'm on Thunderbird version 140.9.0esr at present.

Machine: Dell Inspiron 15 Series laptop

Monitor: Viewsonic 27"

System: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS

RAM: 16 GB

For the last 2 versions of Thunderbird, I have seen that even after reading the new messages, the green new messages indicator remains on the TB icon in the taskbar.

Refer to screenshot.

It should of course disappear as soon as the new messages are all opened. Otherwise one thinks that there is an unread message somewhere among the mail folders, even though on checking there is not.

This remains so until TB is closed and re-opened. After re-opening the green circled number is gone.

Of course, this is more a nuisance than a serious problem.

But it would be nice to have it sorted by the next version.

Thunderbird Filelink uses end-to-end encryption and files are only encrypted/decrypted locally but unless the code running on your system is reviewed and validated you don't really know what it does. I would think that every time recipients click on the link and use the web interface to download a file, their browser is sent a script that does the decoding. Similarly, if you use the web interface of a Send instance to send a file, your browser is sent a script for encoding.

If the above is correct, how do we know these scripts are always the open source scripts that have been independently validated? Isn't it conceivable that a Send instance may send you a customized script for encryption/decryption that compromises encryption? This could be done with selected targets to avoid attracting attention too.