Having looked further at the recovered structure,.. many folders are empty,.. so I am missing many emails... where would Thunderbird have stored files/emails.

If snap installed Thunderbird in a different directory (which it well could have) then you could see the symptoms you listed.

So you need to point to the "old" profile. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles

Hi Wayne,.. many tx for responding,.. have followed your suggestions,.. and I cannot directly find any 'profiles',.. but what I have found in the snap structure.. '/var/lib/snapd/snaps' is a file as follows:- root root 220479488 May 29 10:08 thunderbird_735.snap I was wondering if this is my folder structure all neatly packed away with the profile etc.? as it would seem way too big for libraries dbases and executables... What is my best way forward,.. go back to a snap install or stick with the locally installed App. Many tx Mark

Hi Mark, I'm sorry to hear about this and what a pain! I have a few questions to help get to the bottom of your issue..

1. When you opened Thunderbird and said "the interface was broken, menus were blank, so no ability to look at anything., and error message inferring there was a menu config issue was all that was shown", was it just menus and empty folders? or were the actual accounts missing as well?

• If the accounts were still there, then this should not indicate the wrong profile location was being used.
• If the accounts were however missing and needed to be re-setup (you did this anyways since you re-installed the snap), then it means the incorrect location for the profile was being used. And if the incorrect profile is being used.. I wonder if your initial install of Thunderbird (that was working before yesterday) was installed before we changed the snap to use profile in `~/.thunderbird` instead of `~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird`. This change was made back in February so if you had the Thunderbird snap installed before this change and hadn't opened Thunderbird since (or had automatic snap updates turned off), and then opened Thunderbird yesterday and it updated to a version that uses the new `~/.thunderbird` profile directory, then perhaps it would cause profile issues.

2. After you reinstalled the Thunderbird snap, you said that you imported old local folders.. Were these folders exported when you know Thunderbird was working?

Hi Heather,... Many tx for responding,.. to address Point 1. Interface not responding... All I was presented with was a window ( no meaningful contents, other than an error message),.. with pull down menus at the top,.. but no commands within, just blank spaces.. there were no folders displayed,.. the window was just blank,.. other than a single error message that a menu was not working,.. so no input or control of anything. Now.. AFAIK,.. when I went to bed the previous night,.. all was fine,.. what happened over night I do not know. Having looked at my ~/.thunderbird structure,.. nothing has been updated this year (2025),.. inferring activity is happening somewhere else... And to clarify,.. I removed snap Thunderbird and reinstalled local App thunderbird,.. 'assuming' I would/ could use my local .thunderbird structure, ( not realising this was not case ). I have been using thunderbird snap since a clean install of 24.04 in May last year,... when snap Thunderbird installed and started up I seem to recall,.. it just found everything,.. and just worked,... so never gave it a second thought as to where it was actually storing folders and emails. ( bad mistake) Imported folders were NOT from a recent export,.. I 'assumed' this was where folders were being stored,... but looking at file dates this is not the case... as it all dates back to probably pre May 2024 install,.. I was wondering,.. are my folders wrapped up in the thunderbird_735.snap squashFS file?? ( hoping). Many tx again Mark

Hey Mark thanks for that additional information.

When you say you installed local App thunderbird, was this from an unpacked tarball from thunderbird.net?

I'm glad to hear that the snap just found everything and worked initially. At the release of Ubuntu 24.04 (until this February), the Thunderbird snap used a profile in `~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird`. Currently the profile the snap should use is `~/.thunderbird`. Wherever the profile is that had the local folders is where you should find them still, so check both places and lmk what you find.

For example, on my system where I'm running the snap, I have `/home/heather/.thunderbird/i0873qnd.default/Mail/Local Folders`. If I `snap remove thunderbird`, this Local Folders path is still there. If I re-install the snap, then it uses this same profile and sees the Local Folders again.

Also no `/var/lib/snapd/snaps/thunderbird_735.snap` will not have your local folders. This is the actual snap that snapd has downloaded and installed. The profile is a separate thing (should be ~/.thunderbird) that contains the Local Folder information.

was this from an unpacked tarball from thunderbird.net?,.. install process as below sd captured from history..

1865  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
1866  sudo apt update
1867  sudo apt upgrade -y
1868  sudo apt remove thunderbird
1869  sudo snap remove thunderbird
1870  sudo apt update
1871  sudo apt install thunderbird

My ~/.thunderbird is as follows. mark@mhnuc:~/.thunderbird$ ls

5xa93jqx.default-release   installs.ini     profiles.ini       yg1lgybt.default

'Crash Reports' 'Pending Pings' profiles.ini.org I have tried importing the two folders yg1l... and 5xa9... folders and only confounded the problem,.. as neither of these folders contain my recent 2025 activity... which is still hiding somewhere,.. I hope..

Snap packages store their user data within your home directory in the ~/snap/ directory. This is where I'd start looking for the profile data.

Thankyou for your suggestion,.. I have looked through the snap structure you suggested,.. and I can find nothing that would lead me to believe I have the 2025 email structure I am looking for... Thinking about my situation,.. all the data I have lost is structure / folders created since I started using the snap version of thunderbird from May last year,... hence all 2025 data is MIA,... Many Tx,.. still looking / hoping.. Mark

I have done a 'du | grep 2025',.. as root, from / (root) ... and have found no thunderbird related folders... yet a 'du | grep 2024',.. throws up many thunderbird folders,.. not looking good,.. as there are essentially some 36 folders missing all created with thunderbird snap time..

When you removed the snap, it made a backup (snapshot) and you can find those (stored for 30 days) in /var/lib/snapd/snapshots. Look here and see if you find a thunderbird snapshot. For example the snapshot I see on my system is /var/lib/snapd/snapshots/14_thunderbird_128.11.0esr-1_735.zip and this contains my profile that had local folders.) The snapshot id number is the leading number so I'm looking at snapshot id 14.

You can reinstall the snap and restore this old snapshot number but first I want to point out that the thunderbird you have installed from the ppa is a deb (the historical way of packaging thunderbird for debian derivative OSes) and you do not need to remove this when installing and testing out the snap and restoring from the snapshot. But it would be a good idea to remove your ~/.thunderbird directory so it is not accidentally used since there may be some bug in the snap of which profile directory is being used (~/.thunderbird or ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird). $ mv ~/.thunderbird ~/.thunderbird.backup

Reinstall the snap $ sudo snap install thunderbird

Now I want to restore the previously identified snapshot but first I want to make sure that only the thunderbird snap will be affected / was saved and updated in this snapshot: $ snap saved --id=14 Set Snap Age Version Rev Size Notes 14 thunderbird 43.1m 128.11.0esr-1 735 32.9MB -

Now that I'm confident I won't be changing the state of any other snaps on my system, I can restore this snapshot: $ sudo snap restore 14

Now when you run the thunderbird snap (run it from the CLI so you know you're running your thunderbird snap and not the deb), you should see your local folders. $ snap run thunderbird

Another way to check is to look in ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/9qcv49n8.default/Mail/Local\ Folders/

Let me know how it goes. I'm also happy to setup a quick call to help you troubleshoot and get to the bottom of this a bit quicker :)