I think you'll have trouble. Most users who try NAS seem to have inexplicable difficulties.

I wouldn't do it myself. It's kind of "off piste" and not how Thunderbird was designed or intended to run. Furthermore, it wouldn't suit me because I use a mix of OSes, and profiles are not, in general, interoperable between different OSes.

There was some discussion between folk who I respect, and I believe that they know what they're talking about, which brought up some cases where failure to write causes hangups and freezes (mainly because it doesn't always handle error messages well).

One of the potential causes of write errors would be that Thunderbird locks its profile and unless you were very careful, you might find that you have multiple concurrent instances of Thunderbird running on your different machines. Since it's "first come, first served", the particular instance of Thunderbird that came up first would own the profile to the exclusion of all the others.

My own choice is to use:

• IMAP for mail
• Google Contacts and gContactSync for address books
• Google Calendar and Lightning for calendars.

That keeps my data in sync. What it leaves out are filters, and I can live with that.

What can I say .... I like "off-piste" ;-)

It's a pity, but I see the logic. Accessing the same profile simultaneously from different computers could lead to concurrency problems, so I won't try this.

I now use the NAS / cloud method on one computer. That way, I have a backup that is up-to-date all the time. Works perfectly!

Unfortunately, IMAP isn't the way to go for me. My mail archive is larger than my email provider would allow, and I need my filters.

Anyway, thanks for your quick response. The message is clear.

Like Zenos, I am not a fan, but in the case of a seldom used archive you might get away with storing a part of your profile on the NAS.

What we all have forgotten is that much of our data is actually seldom accessed and even Thunderbird does not spend much time looking at a lot of it. This is really evidenced by the length of time that can occur between an anti virus deleting the inbox and the user becoming aware. The MSF files are updated, but rarely is the entire folder parsed and the MSF rebuilt.

I do not recommend this for workgroups, but it is possible to create a mail account in Thunderbird and store the data for that account "outside" the general profile. This has all sorts of bad implication when it comes to moving the profile as there is an absolute location stored for that accounts data. But it is a case of once aware you can work around such issues.

I have a pop mail account that I renamed archive. It appears in my folder pane as the archive account. It also stores it's mail, not in my profile, but on a USB drive. I have each mail account set to use the folders of that account as the "archive" folder. So when I archive mail it is backed up off my main disk, but remains in the global search index. If that Gb dive ever fills I will upgrade it.

It would be possible to use the same logic to create a shared archive which "should" cause a lot less issues. Especially if you only ever actually archived from a single instance. Read contention in my experience is less likely that read /write.

I offer it only as a possible alternative. It works for me as I set it up. YMMV a lot.

@Zenos, your turn to have me looking something up in Google. I to like the "off-piste" term. It describes the situation perfectly.