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Flatpak: Email folders not showing after migration.

  • 6 uphendule
  • 2 zinale nkinga
  • 47 views
  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu BobG

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Moving to a new laptop, running Fedora 36, with Flatpak. Was able to migrate Thunderbird profile without issue. However, I can not see any of my email folders or the contents of my inbox. Under Account Settings/Server Settings/Message Storage/Local Directory is a path to my email folders. While that location is correct, the email folders still do not show for the account. I "Browsed" to them again, and now the Local directory shows /run/flatpak/doc/8cad13c1/mail-remote However, that did not help, as email folders are still not shown. What am I missing here?

Moving to a new laptop, running Fedora 36, with Flatpak. Was able to migrate Thunderbird profile without issue. However, I can not see any of my email folders or the contents of my inbox. Under Account Settings/Server Settings/Message Storage/Local Directory is a path to my email folders. While that location is correct, the email folders still do not show for the account. I "Browsed" to them again, and now the Local directory shows /run/flatpak/doc/8cad13c1/mail-remote However, that did not help, as email folders are still not shown. What am I missing here?

Isisombululo esikhethiwe

I took the advice of @Toad-Hall and uninstalled the flatpak version of thunderbird, then installed the version available as an rpm via dnf/yum and that worked. Life is good.

Funda le mpendulo ngokuhambisana nalesi sihloko 👍 0

All Replies (6)

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As a follow-up: Thunderbird is using the correct Local Directory, as it is creating an INBOX-1.msf file in it. Not sure why it is ignoring the existing INBOX.msf file, and all of the other email folders in the Local Directory.

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This may not be related to Flatpak. Thunderbird 102.8.0 (64-bit).

It keeps creating new versions of the empty inbox file: INBOX-1.msf, INBOX-2.msf, etc...

Any thoughts or help on how to get Thunderbird working again will be very much appreciated!

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Continuing on my lonely quest to get my email restored from this Thunderbird's issue...

I removed all of the .msf files I could find.

This was in two places:

  1. The Local Directory, in the local file system, which Thunderbird has labeled as: /run/flatpak/doc/8cad13c1/bobg-remote
  2. And in my home directory: /home/bobg/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/bobg.default

Three results to note:

  1. Thunderbird did not restore my Inbox or any of the other mail folders.
  2. It did recreate an empty INBOX.msf file
  3. On restart it continued creating more inbox files: INBOX-1.msf, INBOX-2.msf

This is odd.

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I believe flatpak uses: ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/<profile name>

So if you previously had thunderbird in the default location, I presume it would be here: Profile folders are located here: ~/.thunderbird/<Profile name>/

So, I would assume you copy the .thunderbird folder from the default location and paste it into the flatpak location : ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/ Thus creating : ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/<profile name> You would need to replace the files, so using the original copy.

Start Thunderbird and check Local Directory: Account Settings/Server Settings/Message Storage/Local Directory: If POP ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/<profile name>/Mail/mail.accname.com if IMAP: ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/<profile name>/ImapMail/imap.accname.com

Also check the 'Local Folders' account Local directory ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/<profile name>/Mail/Local Folders

Alternative: choose to not use flatpak and instead get a download from the official location:

Installing Thunderbird on Linux:

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Thank you @Toad-Hall

Yes, I did move my profile over to the new location and thunderbird has all of my settings. Not an issue there.

I keep my remote mail over in /opt. For example: /opt/thunderbird/bobg-remote So Account Settings/Server Settings/Message Storage/Local Directory points over there, and that is where Thunderbird is creating the INBOX-N.msf files, so I know that it is set correctly.

I don't use Local Folders, but is set similarly to /opt/thunderbird/bobg-local

Of course, flatpack rewrites those, as described above.

I will uninstall the flatpack thunderbird and go with a direct installation, and see how that goes.

Thanks for the help!

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Isisombululo Esikhethiwe

I took the advice of @Toad-Hall and uninstalled the flatpak version of thunderbird, then installed the version available as an rpm via dnf/yum and that worked. Life is good.