Issue migrating thunderbird to new install

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1

Hey everybody,
I just moved to fedora 36 from Linux mint and am quite happy with the experience so far.
Getting into all the configurations, I came across an issue for which I haven’t found any similar experiences online. Therefore, the question here.

So as usual, when migrating from one system to another, I copied the .thunderbird folder as explained by mozilla and fedora.

It’s just that Thunderbird doesn’t show the changes when opening the program.

Does anyone have an idea what could be the problem?

I tried it both with the flatpak and the dnf version of Thunderbird.
I’m using Thinkpad X230, i5, 8gb ram + SSD.

Thanks a lot in advance!

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permission issue?

can you check who is the owner of .thunderbird is? Also check the SELinux context, or relabel ~/.thunderbird (using restorecon)

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Thanks for your reply!

the root user account is the owner of .thunderbird.

As I’m new to Fedora, I don’t have an idea what this means.
Trying to read about SELinux and restorecon now. Any suggestions where to begin?

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4

That is your issue right there. If the owner of the directory ~/.thunderbird is root, your regular user does not have access.

You need to change ownership…

from command line (terminal), the command looks like this:chown -R username:group directory, so something like

 sudo chown -R <youruser>:<yourgroup> ~/.thunderbird/

now, replace <youruser> and <yourgroup> with your username and your groupname.

example:

sudo chown -R wantuh:wantuh /home/wantuh/.thunderbird/
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I just want to note that this document is for Fedora release 13, which was released (and obsoleted) years ago. So please follow it with care—it may not apply to current versions of tools.

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6

In addition to the advice already given… Sometimes TB will create a new profile even though you copied the .thunderbird folder over. It creates a new ‘installation’ identifier and it doesn’t get matched up with an existing profile. Simply start Thunderbird from the command line like so: thunderbird -p

Then you can create a new named profile, and you can browse to your known good profile folder and link it to your new profile. All should be well at that point. I’ve done it a million times (I experiment a lot). The same thing holds true for Firefox as well.

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That worked!
thank you very much <3