Desperately in need of help with Thunderbird upgrade

[Mick Bailey]

This morning I tried logging into my E-mail only to find my old Thunderbird version has been upgraded to 78.7. I checked the versions using sudo apt policy thunderbird and get;

Installed: 1:78.7.1+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1~mt1
Candidate: 1:78.8.0+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1~mt1
Version table:
1:78.8.0+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1~mt1 500
500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages
*** 1:78.7.1+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1~mt1 100
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1:68.10.0+build1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 500
500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages
500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security/main amd64 Packages
1:52.7.0+build1-0ubuntu1 500
500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

The new version did not carry over my old profile; It's a blank install with no messages, contacts, calendar or anything else.

I desperately need to get into my emails and calendar. Can anyone tell me how to do this, or how to revert back to my previous build without losing anything. This is a real annoyance and there was never any warning at all my machine was being destructively upgraded.

[Dave H]

Must be an Ubuntu/Thunderbird problem. I'm on Windows, Thunderbird 78.7.1 and it's working fine. As a temporary measure can't you access your emsail via web mail? Last time I had a problem with Thunderbird I uninstalled/reinstalled it, entered my gmail address and it filled in the server settings and downloaded all my messages again.

[Mick Bailey]

I can log into Gmail but my BT account doesn't show any sent items - only received. I'm in the middle of a legal dispute with a firm of solicitors and sent a number of emails over the past few days and I need to recover them. I use the BT account for personal stuff. I can't understand why they aren't showing up, though some older messages are there.

[Mick Bailey]

I've been on this solid all day long. The upgrade results in an additional profile being created - Default-beta, which is a blank profile the system now defaults to. I wrongly thought that the old Default profile would be saved. There is a Default, but when I switched to it that's also blank. It's all screwed up and I ended up restoring my old profile from my last backup and that now seems to be working fine, with all the mailboxes, calendar appointments and address book present up to that point.

[big_teee]

I just use yahoo web mail.
I leave everything on the server.
Here's a T-Bird support page.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/thunderbird
Don't know if that would shed any light or not?
GL,
T

[Mick Bailey]

Thanks. I did register and post the problem on the support page, but no replies. I did find others who also had the same issue but who had gone a more complicated route of regressing the install. What really annoys me is that there is no longer any provision in 78.7 to turn off forced upgrades. I also think that the last 68.x upgrade removed this feature as well, hence the upgrade to the current version being automatic. Also annoying is that I've gone from a stable release to a beta copy in the process.

[Dave H]

My 78.7 isn't set to auto update. It's set to "Check for updates but let me chose whether to install them" Don't you have that option? It's been nagging me to update to 78.8 for a while now but I've been ignoring it.

[big_teee]

Don't you have that option?

When you do the daily updates in most Linux?
It updates everything.
I've had that issue with firefox.
It upgrades Firefox to the newest version, and no easy way to go back.
Most of the time everything works!
T

[Mick Bailey]

I no longer have any option to turn off updates within Thunderbird - maybe it has to be done from the command line now. The last lot of general updates was a few days ago. I have noticed that Thunderbird gets updated this way - usually fixes and things that I'm unaware of that don't affect the functionality. I usually accept these but decline the major upgrades until I'm sure that everything will continue working OK.

It's interesting that the 68.10.0 profile works with 78.7.1, but I then copied this over to another machine that runs Thunderbird 68.10.0 and it says the profile has been modified by a newer version and cannot be used.

[big_teee]

Because of crashes, I have at least 2 linux OS on each of my laptops.
This laptop has Ubuntu 20.10 on partition 2, and 20.04 on partition 3.
Both share the same Storage Documents partitions.
That way if one OS has a problem I can still boot to the other Linux OS.
Me being a Linux Junky, if I tear one up, I still have a backup.
Something like that, may work also with T-bird, one on each OS?
T

[Mick Bailey]

I was thinking along the same lines, so besides my main laptop I've installed Mint and Xubuntu as single boot and a dual boot Mint/Windows 7 PC. My backups are now to SSD plugged in to my router. Installing a dual boot configuration on my main laptop seems like a good idea to test the newer versions of Ubuntu - I'm still running 18.04.

[big_teee]

Sounds like you have a plan going forward.
Here is the Partition Layout I use on my Dell i5, with solid state NVME drive.
I have 3 partition with Linux.
One partition for swap.
One partition-9 for storage.
I keep my documents there, and I access them from all 3 Linux OS.
I have 3 partitions spare, that are unequiped.
I am currently booted up on Fedora.
This laptop runs better on Fedora, than on Ubuntu.
T

[Mick Bailey]

That's useful - I'm now thinking of getting a bigger SSD to play around with and investigate Fedora.

[big_teee]

Here's another laptop patition layout.
This is my HP i5 test computer, with a SATA SSD Samsung 1TB drive.
I keep this computer on my desk, just to test linux distros and software on.
It is layed out similar, but a bit different than the others.

sda1 EFI
sda2 Ubuntu 20.10
sda3 Fedora FC33
sda4 Ubuntu 21.04
sda5 Mageia 8
sda6-8 Spare
sda9 Swap
sda10 Storage

I try to get the drive partitioned like I want it, and geared for OS growth, at first.
Because it is hard or not possible to make big partition changes, once you have the drive in use.
On multi-boot drives, only one OS partition will control the efi grub boot loader, on efi partition 1.
Ubuntu does the best job at multi-boot.
So I have the grub boot loader on partition 2 ubuntu.
Fedora uses a different grub boot loader setup, so I boot everything from the grub on partition sda2 Ubuntu.

So with the current layout, if I want to get rid of a Distro OS, I simply delete it, and update grub on sda2.
Same for adding a distro os.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Lots of trial and error to get multi-boot figured out, and the test computer, really helps in that process.
GL,
T

[Mick Bailey]

That does make sense and it's much better to see how someone else does this. How do you go about evaluating a new distro? Is it down to look and feel (my way) or something more methodical such as benchmarking?