nasty Thunderbird bug and how to avoid it

Post by **bad_brain** » 14 Jul 2008, 05:20

there is a nasty bug in the Thunderbird email client, it might never happen to you but when it happens it is totally annoying, it happened yesterday to me for the 2nd time already. you start Thunderbird, it kinda hangs, you close and restart it and *BOOM!*: all accounts gone. I spent hours with googling and following the instructions to restore the profile, but none worked (and they even say on the mozilla site that is sometimes is simply impossible to recover the profile).
this bug only appears when you use the "default" profile that is created automatically on the initial Thunderbird setup, so to avoid it create a custom profile (the only "custom" about it is the profile name) by:
Start->run->thunderbird -profilemanager

G-Brain · Post by **G-Brain** » 14 Jul 2008, 05:36

Woah, that's bad. Any specific reason you use Thunderbird? Any killer features?

I switched from Thunderbird to vm inside emacs, it's never given me any problems.

Post by **ayu** » 14 Jul 2008, 07:18

Hmm, I use thunderbird as well, and I dunno if I use the default profile, don't remember ^^. But fortunately it hasn't happened to me yet, but I might as well change the profile, just to be sure. I usually backup all my account data though, since I format the comp a lot to test different distros or to simply get a clean install.

@G-Brain: well, it's a mail/RSS client that works very well, and it's not Outlook Express ^^

MariaLara · Post by **MariaLara** » 14 Jul 2008, 08:29

That happened to me once too. I just assumed it was something I did.
Even if it was me I now can blame the bug.

Post by **bad_brain** » 14 Jul 2008, 10:30

@g-brain
I really enjoy the RSS feed functionality, also plugins like lightning (a real great calendar with groupware functionality) or spamato are features I don't want to miss anymore. those 2 crashes are the only bad experiences I made yet, of course those been the most annoying ones possible....so I thought about using another client, but nahh...I'm too lazy...

I only use it on XP, my Debian Lenny system is for fun and experiments...so it makes no real sense to set up an email client there, I mean, there is a reason why it is the "unstable branch" of Debian...

@MariaLara
I don't think it was because "you did something", because to remove a profile you would have to start the profile manager via thunderbird -profilemanager, pick the profile, delete it, and then verify you want it really to be removed. so the chances to do this by accident are about zero...the bug is well known, at least you can find a lot of people that had the same problem via google.

@cats
well, the weird thing is that all profile data still exists, thunderbird simply isn't able anymore to read it...even when creating a new profile and moving the files into it. so if you want to be on the safe side use this to make a backup: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

Post by **pseudo_opcode** » 14 Jul 2008, 14:51

yeah man i too enjoy lightning, and foxclocks, they're cool, they add cool functionality to thunderbird,

thunderbird has become one of my essential tools on windows box, since my lappy has windows and i only use my lappy for emails, its one very important app, i generally backup my data from time to time, with mozbackup, though i never faced this kind of problem.

Post by **ayu** » 14 Jul 2008, 14:59

Hmmm, think I'll try mozbackup ^^ sounds like a useful app =)

Post by **pseudo_opcode** » 14 Jul 2008, 16:24

yeah everytime i format my windows, i backup my firefox and thunderbird data, everything, settings, addons, emails, bookmarks, passwords, easily, and restoring them is also very easy, its a good app