"You have launched an older version of thunderbird"

Question

Dual boot (windows 7 and Ubuntu 18.04), have set up shareable email profile correctly, and it worked once. Then the Windows side of Thunderbird got a point release update. That broke the Ubuntu side with the subject message and some more stuff about having to create a new profile, set up all my accounts again, etc. That is exactly what I do NOT want. My goal is seamless dual boot with all cross-platform functionality (Thunderbird, Firefox, Libre Office, etc.) intact. Obtaining a version Thunderbird for Ubuntu 18.04 which will make nice with the current Windows version seems impossible. Is there a workaround/hack to get Ubuntu Thunderbird to shut up and use the shared profile anyway?

Answer 1

As noted in a comment by mook765, deleting the compatibility.ini file in your Thunderbird profile folder (~/.thunderbird/profiles/*/) might solve the issue for a single time, but the file gets recreated and updated with your version again.

Instead, Thunderbird can be launched with the --allow-downgrade option to ignore the last running version and launch the profile anyway, even if it was before updated to a higher version.

This might probably be dangerous if the last run migrated your profile data to a version that is not backwards-compatible, so it's always good to have regular backups anyway. Making sure you don't run wildly different versions but always keep all of them to at least the same major release should minimize the risk.

To always use --allow-downgrade, you might make a copy of your /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop launcher file, place it in ~/.local/share/applications/ and edit all the lines starting with Exec=thunderbird to include that command-line option.

Answer 2

You can get Thunderbird to go to version 68.7.0 by adding in the Mozilla Security Repo. The repo should allow for Thunderbird to stay more up to date.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade