Moving thunderbird data for use by another user -- RESOLVED

Fred Krogh · Last edited by Fred Krogh on Wed Oct 03, 2018 5:50 pm; edited 1 time in total

I just copied /home/user1/.thunderbird to /home/user2/.thunderbird, and used chown to change the file ownership to user2. I want all the mail that was processed by thunderbird for user1 to be processed by user2. (I'm hoping to remove user1 from the system.) Amazingly it seems to work except for this

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:21 am Post subject:

I'm not sure, but I would try removing (not just disabling) all Add-ons in Thunderbird, restart Thunderbird, then re-add the Add-ons.
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khayyam · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:35 am Post subject:

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:40 am Post subject:

True. If the OP has trouble removing the Add-ons via the Thunderbird GUI, he may have to edit the file directly.
_________________
Clevo W230SS: amd64, VIDEO_CARDS="intel modesetting nvidia".
Compal NBLB2: ~amd64, xf86-video-ati. Dual boot Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
OpenRC udev elogind & KDE on both.
Fitzcarraldo's blog

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:43 am Post subject:

If you're just trying to move mail from user1 to user2 then move or copy the Mail directory under /user1/.thunderbird/<id>/ to /user2/.thunderbir/<id>

You may lose which has been processed/read but that's easily solved.
copying the id directory copies all preferences and addons, which is probably not what you want.

Edit to add: selectively copying things like certain *.sqlite, *.dat, etc might work for keeping what's been processed/not-processed.

ETA2: If you're simply trying to duplicate everything under user1 for user 2, then copy everything under /user1/.thunderbird/<id> to /user2/.thunderbird/<id>
OR
if you're wanting to have an exact dup, including <id> under .thunderbird, then just copy the .thunderbird directory from user1 to user2.

It all depends on exactly what you're trying to do.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:19 pm Post subject:

I successfully moved my sister's mail from Windows to Gentoo by installing Thunderbird on Gentoo, then copying her profile rather than the entire directory. I did have to reinstall add-ons and preferences, but all the mail was there.
This is not the same as what you are doing in several respects, but the ma8il was preserved.
I suggest trying that procedure and see if it does what you want. It didn't take long using a USB stick. It would be even quicker if both users are on the same machine.

Fred Krogh · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 4:28 pm Post subject:

This has turned into a pretty big mess. Let's call my users, u1 and u2. I'm doing most of my work as u2, but getting the mail as u1, and u1 is used for nothing but mail. I have recently decided not to run my own mail server and so u1 is no longer needed. My mail is now hosted elsewhere. I don't care if I log in as u1 or u2, but the mail is best if it thinks the login is u1. I started by trying to copy all of u2 data to u1, chown-ing it to u1. That destroyed my desktop (if logged in as u1), so then I thought why not just move the mail to u2, and I can continue as u2. Either of those would be a happy solution for me, but neither choice seems to work very well. I have followed the suggestions above, editing prefs.js. Then I could not get mail from the mail sserver since that server only wanted to talk to u1. Then I changed the account setting (inside thunderbird) from u2 to u1 thinking that would fix the problem. Password is still not accepted. So is there an easy way out of this mess? Right now I'm thinking that perhaps logging in as u1 and fixing the desktop (I'm using xfce3) is perhaps the safest. I've tried to copy all of u2's data into u1, but it seems the system is inclined to skip some things. With this approach I'd just delete u2 when all is done. Whatever happens here, I'll post what is ultimately done.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:01 pm Post subject:

if you are going to copy from user1 to user2, root needs to do the copy, ie "cp -ap user1/.thunderbird user2" or whatever part of the directories you're going to copy
THEN after the copy root needs to do "chown -R <user2 name>:<user2 group> user2/.thunderbird"

NOTE: I use user1 and user2, user1 is the from person, user2 is the receive person, I don't care what id's you use.
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Fred Krogh · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:08 pm Post subject:

All that you suggest was done. But there are little corners that need attention. One was the desktop, and now I'm dealing with a lock connected with user2 when it should be asking for a lock from user1 when starting gnucash. I suspect little things like this are going to be popping up from time to time, but that they won't be all the difficult to fix.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:24 pm Post subject:

If anything on the desktop interfaces with thunderbird/mail, then you'll have to adjust the users desktop and links for mail accordingly. But as you say that shouldn't be too difficult.

Edit to add: I don't know anything about gnucash, don't use it, but if any application interfaces with thunderbird, then you'll probably need to adjust those.
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland