Thunderbird Snap cannot access profile outside home after 24.04 upgrade

[J B]

After upgrading yesterday to 24.04, thunderbird would not open. I got the error "Thunderbird is already running, but not responding". In the terminal, it looks like this:

$ thunderbird
Gtk-Message: 10:04:38.068: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libpci missing
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
console.error: (new UnknownError("IndexedDB: thunderbird/url-classifier-skip-urls getLastModified() IndexedDB: The operation failed for reasons unrelated to the database itself and not covered by any other error code.", "resource://services-settings/IDBHelpers.jsm", 18))

The cause of this is that in ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini I list a profile path that is outside /home in a data directory that sees regular back ups.

thunderbird is in snap now, and snaps are hardcoded (https://askubuntu.com/questions/1033344/how-to-give-snaps-access-to-somedir) to permit no data access beyond /home.

This is the reason it could not start any more.

A possible way forward is to make the data access of snaps configurable.

In the meanwhile, I uninstalled the snap-thunderbird and installed deb-thunderbird following
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2024/03/install-thunderbird-deb-ubuntu-2404/

[Cristian Marchi (cri79)]

Hi, same error message here after ubuntu 24.04 upgrade from 23.10. I've my tb profile and mail stored on a second hard drive. Creating a new tb profile and linking it to the existing folder in the second hd, I can see the email account in the left panel in tb but no emails are displayed.

I noticed that in the "profile.ini" the link to the existing folder is now "/run/user/1000/doc/25c344c1/TBprofile" while in the non-snap tb in ubuntu 23.10 it was "/mnt/POSTA/TBprofile". Both paths are accessible using the terminal

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.