Trying Suse Leap for the fist time, running into some little things.
There are multiple profiles, so .thunderbird is symbolic link to the actual file. It is not uncommon on this system that hidden files with standard name are symbolically linked to more descriptive visible names.
So the ‘AI’ tells me it is an AppArmor problem, but there is no profile in /etc/apparmor for Thunderbird.
What is really happening here? How to fix it?
The .thunderbird directory is no symbolic link on a healthy system.
The profiles are inside of the .thunderbird directory. What actual issue do you have? The profiles can be choosen from the Thunderbird profile manager. To open the profile manager, execute following command from a terminal:
thunderbird -p
2026-09-01 14:14:08 Z [:] Thomas_email@Yangming
§/home/Thomas/subu_data/email§
> ls -al
total 44K
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 Thomas_email Thomas_email 16 2024-11-25 09:59 .thunderbird -> thunderbird_2023
drwx------ 1 Thomas_email Thomas_email 396 2026-09-01 12:52 thunderbird_2023
2026-09-01 14:14:11 Z [:] Thomas_email@Yangming
§/home/Thomas/subu_data/email§
>
(edited to add a live example)
What is the connection between the two pictures? You may want to explain what you are doing. Simply opening Thunderbird as example from the menu, and creating a new Account (which is part of a profile), will place all the settings into the profile directory in the .thunderbird directory.
Something seems off with your account creation strategy or your box. No problems here with AppArmor and Thunderbird.
FYI I updated the post to show a live example, where everything goes together, instead of making a representation of the case. There is very little difference, and nothing of substance.
The first picture shows from a shell the user home directory, with the symbolic link to the Thunderbird profile that is live.
The second picture shows Thunderbird not finding its profile. So then, perhaps the issue is not AppArmor, but is of the SUSE install not looking for the users current data, but doing something with ‘-esr’?
thunderbird-2023 is not a user profile. How did you create this directory? You say Thunderbird can’t find it? Is it a copied directory from another /old installation? Thunderbird references the used profiles in the profiles.ini which can be managed via the profile manager.
So there are many informations missing in this picture.
This is the profiles.ini, the .thunderbird directory and the profile manager on a normal system (TW in this case, so default-release instead of default-esr)
This home directory mounted on a Debian system, when Thunderbird runs, opens the mail box fine.
The same home directory mounted on a SUSE LEAP system does not find the user’s email, and instead comes up as nothing has been configured.
What does SUSE do differently. As I mentioned, given to an ‘AI’ it blames AppArmor. In reading more I gather SUSE wants default-esr instead of default. Should I merely change the selection in this menu?
The use of symbolic links is normal and healthy. It points Thunderbird to the correct snapshot of the mail directory. In this case, the mail was last reset three years ago, 2023. Hence email has been working fine since 2023, but the changing the platform from Debian to SUSE, then mounting the home directory gives this behavior.
Yeah, hopefully I didn’t screw something else up, always possible, but the only things that changed here between mounts was the OS.
Using the same home directory on different distributions is the best way how to screw your system.
If you want to use the old Debian Thunderbird profile, you need to make sure that both Thunderbird versions are exactly the same. Than create a new profile on your openSUSE box and point the file path for the profile to the old Debian Thunderbird profile.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer
Not really following hui. It is standard procedure to mount the home directories. When an older version is retired, the user’s data is preserved, then mounted under the new system. That way the user doesn’t lose his data.
I’m not understanding your profile diagram. ‘.thunderbird’ is a symbol link. thunderbird-2023 or thunderbird-2026 is the target of the link, it is not a profile under ‘.thunderbird’.
Here is what we see under .thunderbird:
2026-09-01 14:48:33 Z [:] Thomas_email@Yangming
§/home/Thomas/subu_data/email§
> ls .thunderbird
. 3f3hux31.default-default 'Crash Reports' profiles.ini vd4oetd2.default-default
.. 4emg0v90.default-release installs.ini profiles.ini.bak
0upmi8tr.default-esr 59u3z7mm.default-default 'Pending Pings' ugyu5o46.default
2026-09-01 14:48:38 Z [:] Thomas_email@Yangming
§/home/Thomas/subu_data/email§
>
You see the ‘ls’ walks through the symbolic link as though it were not there. Although it does ls .thunderbird it shows the contents of thunderbird-2023.
You pointed me at:
“”"
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer
“”"
And it recommends: “To move your data, you can copy your profile folder to the equivalent location on your destination computer.”
And that is exactly what I have done here.
And now proceed with reading the chapter " On your destination computer".
In case you have SELinux active on openSUSE Leap 16.0 (which is the default as far as I know) and want to share a directory between openSUSE and debian (I know nothing about debian!) I would expect that the SELinux-context of that directory must fit the expectations of both OSs.
@susejunky I’m not expecting it to work under both Debian and Suse alternately. Rather the home directory was unmounted from Debian, then Debian was overwritten with Suse, and then the home directory was mounted again.
It turns out that the exact same version of Thunderbird was on the retired Debian system as was on the new Suse system.
The only thing that changed was the location of the Thunderbird binary. It turns out that the Thunderbird binary is aware of its location and looks for a different email folder under .thunderbird if the binary is moved.
Hence, same application, same version of the application, it can’t find the user’s email because the location of the application itself moved. That is nuts.
So the cure was to edit both the init and install profiles to point to the original email folder that was still sitting under the .thunderbird directory, though Thunderbird the program had made its own new email folder.
It can be, but, just to give you an openSUSE only example:
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