The Offtopic Blog

[Linux] Sharing Thunderbird with Windows

If you switch a lot between Windows and Linux, you probably hate having to delete the same mail on both operating systems. Well, there's a solution for that. You'll have to do some manual work, but once it's set up, it works like a charm.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Make sure that you can access your Windows partition from Linux.
2. Start Thunderbird in Linux using root privileges*.
   
3. Close the wizard and the program.
4. Go to your Windows profile folder and search for prefs.js. Copy that file to your Linux profile folder (it's located in /root/.thunderbird/[something].default).
5. Open prefs.js.
   
6. Change the paths in prefs.js to paths that can be accessed from within Linux. Example: C:\Something\ could become /media/windows1/Something/.
7. Remove any line that contains [ProfD].
   
8. Reopen Thunderbird using root privileges*.

That's it. After doing this, you should be able to access your Windows Thunderbird mail using Linux. If you find this explanation too difficult, you might want to read the article source. Although this may also work for Firefox, I haven't tested this.

* You need root privileges because you have to be able to read and write to your Windows profile folder.

Labels: Linux, Mozilla, OS, profile, profiles, share, sharing, software, Thunderbird, Windows

Posted by Pieter De Decker @ 12:56 PM