Email account removal in thunderbird

General Help
1

Hi Zorinarians
I have a thunderbird problem but I would like to run it past you good people on this forum because I don’t totally trust the thunderbird help system to get it right on zorin (they’ve got previous).

My email provider recently changed but I was able to retain my email address, and a new account was created in the new location, same password, all emails synced, etc. all very good so far.

Problem is thunderbird retained the old account details and still opens that on startup.

If I tried to remove the old one using thunderbird account settings >> account actions >> remove account, it got rid of the new one instead of the old one (even though I had the old one highlighted at that time).

I had to sign in every time I connected to the account, but didn’t have time to sort this at the time (some weeks ago) and it’s not really all that much hassle for a short while.

Then I started having problems with the disk being full (impossible! It was only at about 50% two weeks ago!) and couldn’t save anything etc. etc.

I discovered that thunderbird was saving all my emails locally every time I signed in.

I hunted around and deleted all the relevant files and folders to create space (there were 54 copies of the saved emails!) but now I don’t know how to change things safely so that I have only one account and associated profile, and which opens on startup and doesn’t constantly re-save hundreds of thousands of files.

I guess I probably have to delete some more folders and files so here’s what’s on the computer at present (with the full paths removed for clarity):

In .thunderbird:

/32b82z0w.default

/Crash Reports

/edyq5g71.default

/ekmepa34.default-release

/jicuf35v.default-release

/Pending Pings

/installs.ini

/profiles.ini

in /32b82z0w.default:

/blocklists

/calendar-data

/chrome_debugger_profile

/crashes

/datareporting

/extensions

/gmp

/ImapMail

/Mail

/minidumps

/saved-telemetry-pings

/security_state

/settings

/storage

  • lots of .sqlite, .json and other files (too many to copy here just now)

(btw /edyq5g71.default only has one file in it /times.json)

and in /ImapMail:

/imap.iomartcloud.com

/mail.mail.coop

/mail.mail-1.coop

/mail.mail-2.coop

/mail.mail-3.coop

/mail.mail-4.coop

/mail.mail-5.coop

/mail.mail-54.coop

/imap.iomartcloud.com.msf

/mail.mail.coop.msf

/mail.mail-1.coop.msf

/mail.mail-2.coop.msf

/mail.mail-3.coop.msf

/mail.mail-4.coop.msf

/mail.mail-5.coop.msf

/mail.mail-54.coop.msf

you can see I deleted everything previous to copy 54 a couple of days ago but since then have already accumulated 5 more.

Any help on how to safely sort this would be very much appreciated.

Just to remind you I’m not a newbie to Zorin but still wandering about in a daze most of the time.

Asus P5KVM, Zorin 16.3 lite.

2

Sorry that doesn't seem to have rendered very well.
A little confusing as it has created a completely different layout.... if it would help I could post screenshots instead?
Also that bullet point should be a plus sign.

3

When I started having problems with Thunderbird about a year ago I looked around and found a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird. It so far has worked great. You can import your Thunderbird profile directly into Betterbird. It also seems to be much faster than Tbird. I have it set up with 2 email accounts on my desktop and 1 email account on my laptop. I have not had any problem with any of the 3 different accounts.

4

i would delete / remove both new and old account from TB , then add new account again.

for the locally save messages :
go to settings - account settings - synchronization & storage (under the account you want to change) , and uncheck the "keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer" box.

5

Thank you both.
I'll check out betterbird, but in the mean time....
Unfortunately both deleting as you say 14nd, and unchecking that message keeping box just revert to what they were before on next startup.
I've tried everything obvious in the settings but when I restart the computer TB has recreated the old account and entirely forgotten the new one, including any changes I just made!

6

perhaps delete and reinstall TB ?
to delete properly:

  1. Remove Thunderbird: Run the command sudo apt-get purge thunderbird (for Ubuntu-based systems) or sudo dnf remove thunderbird (for RPM-based systems).
  2. Remove configuration files: Run the command sudo rm -r ~/.thunderbird to delete the Thunderbird configuration files.
  3. Remove profile folders: Run the command sudo rm -r ~/.thunderbird/Profiles to delete the Thunderbird profile folders.
7

Was that from ChatGPT?

8

no, from some site i cant remember now
why ,is it wrong?

9

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.