Tommaso

Hi, after a cumbersome OS upgrade (Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.10), I faced 2 quite big problems: First, I ended up with the new version of Thunderbird NOT seeing at all my profile, so proposing to create a new one. Just closed it and used my web mailer for 1 month, then I finally found some time to dig: the new TB came as a snap, so its profile folder wa no more in my ~/.thunderbird, but rather in ~/snap/thunderbird/.thunderbird (well, as detailed in a .ini file therein...) So, why doesn't TB automatically detect these cases, and propose to "recover" an existing profile located in a lication that was the same and immutable for the last 15 years, AFAICR? Second, after creating a symlink from the new profile folders location to the old one, I ended up with TB recognizing all my email accounts with their passwords, BUT it apparently lost ALL my Local Folders old contents, i.e., showing an empty Local Folder Inbox, and no Archives (my whole 3GB email archive disappeared from the GUI). After digging, I realized I had a few symlinks bouncing back and forth in my home folder (from ~/ to work-xyz/mail-data/, and from there to ~/work/mail-data/... (you know, in 15 years things become messy). Therefore, TB had correctly found and read all my profile accounts info from the correct old symlinked location, but I noticed it created a new folder in ~/snap/thunderbird/work/mail-data/<profile-name>/Mail/...., ignoring the same folders already in the same profile folder where the account info was correctly found. After reducing the number of needed symlink traversals to just 1, everything was correctly found, but I had a hard and anxious time throughout the process. Despite my setup being uniquely messy, I think there's a bug somewhere, so I wrote this, in the hope it may be useful to devels. Keep doing the hard and excellent work on TB :-)! Tommaso