Ok, let's leave the drives alone for now.
Yes, Nautilus is the real name of the program to explore files. I know it's not a very intuitive name, that's why on Zorin OS and other distributions you might see it labeled as Files. Sometimes people also call it File Manager, File Explorer, etc.
So, Nautilus is a bit special in how it handles file sharing over the network. It uses its own internal components and libraries to gain that functionality. This is a good thing in the sense that file network sharing will work out of the box, but it lead to some confusion in cases like this.
Not to worry, though, you can install the necessary packages system-wide to be able to use this location anywhere.
Since you are already familiar with the command line, that will make it easier:
-
Install the necessary packages:
sudo apt install cifs-utils -
Choose a location in your system where to mount the network share. This location is what Thunderbird and other programs will see (from their perspective, it's accessing the local filesystem).
A typical location for network drives might be inside
/mnt. For now, I recommend creating a dummy folder inside your user's home directory, to make things easier while testing it out. Later you can choose a more suitable location for this.mkdir $HOME/testing_share -
To mount it, run the command:
sudo mount -t cifs //<target_hostname_or>/<path_to_share> <mount_point> -o username=<username>,password=<password>,noexecReplace all the placeholders within angle brackets with the real data. For example:
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.10/data $HOME/testing_share -o username=waldo,password=supersecret,noexecYou could also use a domain name if you have DNS setup locally, but that's another topic. The
noexecis not actually necessary, but it prevents scripts from running on your machine. This boosts security a little bit, but you can remove it if you do need to run files from this location.
Give this a try and see how it goes.