Join the Mozilla’s Test Days event from Dec 2–8 to test the new Firefox address bar on Firefox Beta 134 and get a chance to win Mozilla swag vouchers! 🎁

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Controlling access to profiles

more options

I want to share a workstation with another user. I would like to keep emails private to each user. Is it possible to control access to each Thunderbird profile with a password? Is there another way to keep emails private?

I want to share a workstation with another user. I would like to keep emails private to each user. Is it possible to control access to each Thunderbird profile with a password? Is there another way to keep emails private?

All Replies (1)

more options

You could do that but bypassing the password is trivial and reading the content of your email from the stored text files in the profile folder is also possible.

The general best practice is to create another user account on that system and configure their email account in their new account.

Depending on the context (office, family PC, public space or internet Cafe), your threat model may help decide what other precautions you'll need to take if you decide to share your workstation.

For example someone with physical access to the computer could install a key logger, get your main account and login to it to access your full desktop data. Will this happen at home? Probably unlikely. In an Internet Cafe? Possibly.

See this article for more details:

Modified by Fabián Rodríguez