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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.

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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.

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  • why not to create a sym link to the profile folder for ubuntu and arch instead? – Alan Coromano Mar 13 '16 at 11:35
  • working, thanks. how do you manage to share one profile between windows and linux if the file system in Linux is different from the one in Windows and Windows can't work with it? Windows doesn't understand ext2-4. – Alan Coromano Mar 13 '16 at 14:56
  • my thunderbird profile resides on the windows partition - ubuntu has no problems mounting the ntfs partition :) – cmks Mar 13 '16 at 15:14

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