I recently upgraded from 22.04 to 24.04. I’m using Thunderbird email client, and keep all my important emails on local folders. At least, I did until the upgrade. Now the local folder under Thunderbird is empty. Did I do something wrong? Is this a bug? Maybe I should fill out a bug report. I did a backup just before I upgraded, so in theory, I could go to whatever length to either extract the appropriate file from the backup or reinstall 22.04 on another partition and do whatever I need to transfer the local folders. I’ve done this before when installing different distros, but that was years ago and I forgot the process, and now I can’t find it. Mozilla support has an answer for Windows, but not Linux.
Here are the contents of my current version of ~/.thunderbird
drwx------ 12 randy randy 4096 2024-12-27 00:12 1mmx2f6g.default-release
drwx------ 3 randy randy 4096 2025-01-11 01:12 'Crash Reports'
drwx------ 2 randy randy 4096 2024-12-25 00:33 n5wjsniz.default
drwxrwxr-x 2 randy randy 4096 2024-12-26 21:36 n5wjsniz.default.original
drwx------ 2 randy randy 4096 2024-12-25 00:33 'Pending Pings'
drwxrwxr-x 15 randy randy 4096 2024-12-26 21:35 wbdws76b.default
drwxrwxr-x 15 randy randy 4096 2024-12-26 21:37 wbdws76b.default.migrated
drwxrwxr-x 15 randy randy 4096 2025-02-13 01:41 wbdws76b.default-release
-rw-rw-r-- 1 randy randy 62 2024-12-27 00:16 installs.ini
-rw-rw-r-- 1 randy randy 421 2024-12-27 00:16 profiles.ini
Move ~/.thunderbird into ~/snap/thunderbird/common/
When restarting Thunderbird, don’t panic if your folders are missing at first. If they’re IMAP then they will reappear after contacting the server the first time.
@vanvugt, I closed Thunderbird and tried your suggestion, then restarted Thunderbird. The local folder is still empty, even after hitting the Get Messages button. I will take your second piece of advice and be patient and see if they show up sometime in the future.
@vangugt, in addition to copying the .thunderbird directory, I also needed to import. @prcrowley, you were right about that, and I had profile directories in the .thunderbird directory I transferred, although these were all from after the upgrade. I went to menu item tools->import, and then it automatically selected the most recent ‘.default-release’ directory to import. I started the import but it failed. I went to ‘Tools->Developer Tools-> Error Console’ and it said there was no device space. I checked my partition space with df, and it said my home partition was essentially full at 30 GB. It’s a logical volume, so it was fairly easy to add an additional 10 GB to give me 40 GB total. I reran the import process. It imported some of the folders, but not all of them. I waited several hours and checked again, but it still had not fully populated. I checked my partition size again, and it was now completely full at 40 GB! I think the Thunderbird profile directory is corrupt in some way and is using all available space in the home partition. I will have to delete the profile, and try another one, or else recover one from my backup. That’s a task for tomorrow. I should also check for any oversize files.
For me that worked, but I had to move an existing .thunderbird (created at first run of the “snap” Thunderbird) out of the way first.
One more question - I’d have expected Thunderbird to handle the move upgrade without “forgetting” about accounts. Is this expected behaviour (perhaps because for some reason an upgrade is not possible) or a bug?
I agree this feels like a bug. I can only guess it got missed or forgotten because the change to a snap is in the past now. You need to be using an older LTS than 24.04 (usually 22.04) with Thunderbird to notice the issue.
The Thunderbird snap has hooks in place to handle the transition from the deb package to the snap. So that ought to work without the user manually doing a import; If not, it is a bug.
Are your local folders (or something else) still missing?
In case that still fails: Did you upgrade “in-place”, say using the upgrade dialogue in Ubuntu, or did you completely delete 22.04 and then transfered your back-up to 24.04? Did you change your user’s name?
I have kept my Thunderbird files in a separate drive to the rest of my system since May 2009. Every time I re-install a new iteration of Kubuntu I have to import them all over again, pointing to my original profile destination. Since 2009 I have many hundreds of thousands of emails many with large attachments and my emails now occupy 710gb of disc space. Ubuntu does not make it easy to access the right directory, something which should be automated takes a long tedious effort on my part each upgrade. Snaps just adds another level of difficulty for me, so I do not use snaps any more. My recommendation is to totally separate your emails from the system so they are always safe and available. What I have is a text file with my Thunderbird profile and I replace the new profile with that one when doing an upgrade. If you use Gmail in an emergency you can always view them online.
I haven’t had chance to recheck the rest yet, but:
To upgrade, I did sudo do-release-upgrade -m desktop from a konsole session. That worked, with a couple of caveats - one was that something went amiss during the KDE upgrade and I needed to manually connect to the wireless network with nmcli (and later reinstall “plasma nm”, which had gone missing), so the first time I ran Thunderbird after the upgrade there was probably no network access. There was no user name change.
@vidtek99, keepng the emails in a separate drive sounds like a good idea. I had three different Thunderbird profiles, and I think when Thunderbird upgraed, it must have automatically imported all three, even though they were duplicates with different time signatures. This inflated my thunderbird drive by several gigabytes which maxed out my home partition (lvm logical volume). I expanded the volume by 10 GB, and then it took all of that, too. I added another 5 GB, and it was finally content, but way overbloated.
Okay, here’s what I did to solve this problem. As stated above, my home logical volume was at 30 GB, so I expanded it to 40 GB and imported the most recent profile
wbdws76b.default
That filled up the entire additional 10GB and hung up again. I expanded the logical volume again to 45 GB, and it started expanding again, but stopped before it filled it. Finally, I had some empty space on my home partition! The thunderbird profile was bloated at 29 GB with what I assumed to be a lot of duplication. I removed thunderbird using
sudo apt remove thunderbird
and then reinstalled it with
sudo apt install thunderbird
Thunderbird now took up around 600 MB, but I had not imported a profile, but created my primary email, and it started downloading my inbox.
I rebooted to a separate 22.04 Ubuntu installation that I had been using just a few days before I upgraded. I exported the profile from there. I then rebooted back into the new 24.04 installation, entered Thunderbird, and imported this profile I had just exported. Now my thunderbird profile is 13 GB, which is manageable, and the largest block in my home volume. In the future, I think it would be best to export the Thunderbird profile before upgrading. It would probably be wise to export Firefox and Chromium profiles as well, as they also take up a few gigabytes. @vidtek99 suggests keeping the thunderbird profile files on a separate partition. I think that’s a good idea, and perhaps the entire ~/snap directory. I’m glad I had my home partition on a logical volume so I could easily expand it with a few commands, because with the disk space maxed out no files could be written to my home partition by any process.
@rgb99 Glad you have a satisfactory solution. I have every email ever sent and received by me since 1983, the early ones are archived on cd-r, with all the emails since mid-2009 on a 2tb spinning disc.
Pretty sad I suppose, but my archive came in very handy when my business partners tried to shaft me in 2012, and since then looking up medical history and solving family arguments about what happened when!
@nteodosio, I upgraded in place using the command line
sudo apt upgrade
It was the cleanest upgrade, except for this Thunderbird snafu, since I started using Ubuntu, which I believe was with 14.04. I’ve acquired an ingrained fear of doing an upgrade, and wait 8 to 10 months after the release just so the major bugs can get worked out.
I use Xfce for my desktop environment. I had two installations of 22.04 on my computer (one of which is now 24.04), one of Mint 21, and one of Bodhi 20.04 just for emergencies.
The replies here indicate it is indeed a disk space problem. The fix in Thunderbird’s beta channel is supposed to solve, as in my previous comment. To be more precise:
Yes, the snap in the stable channel (i.e. the one everyone gets by default) still duplicates the entire ~/.thunderbird->~/snap/thunderbird/… because moving implies deletion and that is risky, especially when done without the user knowing it.
The snap in the beta channel just creates a link to ~/.thunderbird instead.
It would be nice to receive confirmation this fix is indeed fine and solving the issue, but I reckon we want to ship it to stable very soon anyway.
Not wanting to de-rail this topic into a snap development discussion, but why did you pick a symlink instead of simply using the personal-files interface and leave everything in place where it is.
Copying, moving and symlinking feels like artificially jumping through hoops for no good reason (what is the benefit of copying the stuff into the snap folder instead of allowing the snap to simply access the existing files)
I’m generally usually against the use of personal-files but in the case where people might have gigabytes of existing data like here it would actually make sense and be a lot less error prone…
Because at this point there are users who already have their profiles in ~/snap/thunderbird. (Though for that one still needs to requrest the personal-files to ~/.thunderbird.)
As to why copying was chosen back then, I guess it is exactly because this necessity of approval for the interface, but I cannot really tell as I wasn’t working on it back then.
