Thunderbird suddenly unable to write e-mail to the mailbox
I'm using Thunderbird 140.6.0esr under 64-bit LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) v6.0, fully up to date with patches.
Last night, Thunderbird was working justfine when I switched the PC off. This morning, when I try to collect mail, I get a dialog box with the message
Unable to write the e-mail to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.
I have multiple Terabytes free on the drive, and I have gone through a full file listing and checked all the file attributes. Yes, I have write access.
Just to be sure, I ran a chown against the entire ~/thunderbird directory (~/.thunderbird is a logical link) so I own ~/thunderbird and everything beneath.
I also ran a fsck on the drive, and fsck gave it a clean bill of health - no errors reported. This was just a normal fsck, not including a badblocks check, although I did run badblocks against the drive when I got it new, about two months ago.
I am out of ideas. I suppose I could try running TB with a sudo, but I'm not really happy with doing that routinely.
Does anybody have any ideas? . Thanks,
Brian.
All Replies (4)
Not really a solution, but why would you want to make ~/.thunderbird a symlink pointing to ~/thunderbird? Beats me.
Because when I do a disk-to-disk copy as my method of backing up, it means there are no problems with copying a hidden folder. But then, as you say, this is absolutely irrelevant to my question.
Modified by brian_m
brian_m said
But then, as you say, this is absolutely irrelevant to my question.
Is it? I do not know, but the message is about file permissions perhaps your symlink is not working as it used to in the past. Perhaps try the expedient of a cold start of your system. I am frequently chastised for being condescending for offering fundamental basic in your face advice, but I find that folk appear to have forgotten the fundamentals of troubleshooting. Turn it off snd turn it on again is about as old as electricity powered devices and yet no one appears to be doing it these days.
The problem has persisted through multiple reboots.
brian@ryzen:~$ ls -ld .thunderbird lrwxrwxrwx 1 brian brian 23 May 13 2021 .thunderbird -> /home/brian/thunderbird brian@ryzen:~$ ls -ld thunderbird drwxrwxr-x 21 brian brian 4096 Dec 22 07:46 thunderbird brian@ryzen:~$
And I've checked the file permissions all the way down beneath ~/thunderbird - as you would expect, folders are 775, files are 664.
Brian.
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