How do you change thunderbird temporary file storage?

Question

When I open a message with an attachment and choose to "Open" the attachment, thunderbird downloads the attachment and saves it in /tmp and then opens it.

For security reasons I would like to be able to change the directory where the file is saved from /tmp to somewhere (I will use an encrypted volume). I cannot find a setting in thunderbird to do this, does anyone know if this is possible?

Answer 1

I have a workaround: Thunderbird uses the standard environment variable $TMP by default to determine where to store temporary files. It also uses this folder when you select to "Open" a mail attachment.

Therefore I have simply made a simple script to set this environment variable before launching thunderbird. I have modified my thunderbird shortcuts to use this script.

#!/bin/sh
export TMP=/media/truecrypt1/scratch
nohup thunderbird &

I would still be interested if anyone else has a more elegant solution; perhaps one that only affects the storage location of "Opened" attachments.

Answer 2

If you use an encrypted container, consider mounting a tmpfs over /tmp. This won't be encrypted, but it will be stored only in RAM and its contents will not persist over reboots.

Add this to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs           /tmp            tmpfs   noatime,mode=1777      0       0