Thunderbird and a shared “home” partition

Question

I have arch and ubuntu installed on the same laptop but different partitions. They share the same "home" on a separate partition but with the different user names:

/home
  /ubunut_user
  /arch_user

Now I'm installing thunderbird on Arch and want, of course, it to share the profile and emails that already exist at /home/ubunut_user because I'd installed it before there and has used for a while already.

How can I do that? And should I necessarily first set up all my email accounts at Arch over again and only after that tell it to use the existing profile at /home/ubuntu_user? I want to avoid the necessasity to set them up, I just want to make it work easialy.

Answer 1

Thunderbird easy can share one "profile" from within different operatingsystems and userprofiles.

Find the profile.ini file for each userprofile, normally stored in

$HOME/.thunderbird/profiles.ini

There is a section within

[Profile0]
Name=profile-name
IsRelative=1
Path=nb36v6ly.default      (this varies for each profile)
Default=1

The path is, as long as "IsRelative" is set to "=1", relative to the path where the profile.ini file resides.

Change the path to the existing profile, i.e.

/home/ubunut_user/.thunderbird/b3werewy.default

and set "IsRelative" to "=0". As long as this profile-section is the default one

Default=1

you can run thunderbird now and it will load the existing profile with all settings, addons, accounts and so on.

I share one profile between my ubuntu-box and my windows-box.

Attention: As far as I know only one (!) running thunderbird at a time should access the profile! I don't know if thunderbird is prepared for sharing a profile-path from two running instances at the same time.