Ah - I spotted this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1078395?fpa=1 thread where an answer reads that Lightning is compiled separately for different OS.

I would happily donate some money to a good cause of the hacker's choice if someone works out a process for me on how to script a separate Add-On isntall for each OS?

Thanks, Yuri

I can tell you what I know about Lightning, even though I have read that some of it has recently changed.

Disclaimer: I do dual boot between Windows 10 and LMDE ("Mint"), but I don't attempt to share a profile between them. I may (very infrequently) copy the profile from one to the other.

Lightning connects into Thunderbird at a somewhat lower level than the vast majority of add-ons; it contains binary components. This means it is compiled specifically for each of the main platforms (Windows/Linux/OSX) and also for each significant up-issue of Thunderbird. So you have two possible points of difference:

• two different OSes, and
• possibly out-of-synch versions of Thunderbird.

Either of these would cause the incompatible version of Lightning to be disabled. Look at the following site:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/versions/

…and you'll see the huge number of versions of Lightning available. Bear in mind that the add-ons website detects your OS and shows you only the relevant builds, so there are at least as many again for the other two OSes that you don't see.

However (IIRC) I read in the newsgroup that whatever component of Lightning it is that leads to this situation has been/is going to be designed out, so it comes as a bit of a disappointment to me to hear that maybe it isn't resolved yet.

FYI, one other add-on is or has been known to have the same problem: Enigmail.

Are you running the current version of Thunderbird? TB38.5.1 right now.

Yours is one of the rare situations where breaking your message stores out of the profile may be useful. I normally advise against this because it fragments the profile and makes maintenance rather messy.

In brief:

1. Create a discrete profile for each OS.
2. Install into each profile the required add-ons.
3. Place your message stores in a shared folder (i.e. move the Mail and ImapMail folders to a mutually-accessible location).
4. Adjust the Local Directory in each account, in both profiles, to point at the shared folders.

It is messy; you will now have the same messages in both profiles (but this is a small victory, since IMAP can do this for you for free). You'll now have to manage both profiles, so keeping them up to date takes twice the time.

It's probably less hassle to live with re-installing or re-enabling Lightning each time. For myself, I rely on IMAP to allow me to see the same messages in both installations, I use Google Contacts and Google Calendar to allow both systems to share a common online resource. So, beyond this one dual-boot machine, I also have access to all this data on separate computers e.g. at work, and also on my Android phone and tablet.

In moving profiles between OSes, I have also found that some of my add-ons do write absolute paths to the config files, so of course these also break when shared between Linux and Windows. As far as file content goes, I haven't yet met any issues arising from the Unix/DOS line-ending convention differences.