This is more of an information post than a request for help, however I’d be interested to know if anyone else has a similar experience. The following may be of use in that case.
I’m running two systems with identical hardware (AMD X4, ATI graphics, 4Gb memory and plenty of spare disk space), currently with i386 32-bit Ubuntu-Mate 15.10. This morning, both systems updated Thunderbird (with Lightning calendar) to 1.45.20 via the standard Ubuntu update system. In one machine, Thunderbird’s address book ceased to work: address completion stopped and the address book page showed no folders on the left nor addresses in the centre. Thunderbird on the other machine worked perfectly after the upgrade. That machine runs an image copy of the failed machine, though they will have diverged over time in terms of extra packages installed
I tried the following on the failed machine without success:
- replaced the profile prefs.js with my nightly backup version
- replaced the whole profile with my nightly backup version
- reinstalled Thunderbird via synaptic (having flushed the apt-get cache to ensure a fresh download)
- purged Thunderbird via apt-get, then installed ubuntu-mate-desktop (which gets removed if you remove Thunderbird). That reinstalls Thunderbird
None of these made any difference
Searches of ubuntu fora and the web in general haven’t found anything like this.
I therefore reverted the failed machine’s Thunderbird back to the previous version in the Ubuntu pool which is 38.8.0. I had to search out the lightning extensions as I didn’t see them there (found them on a Ubuntu launchpad page):
- purged Thunderbird and extensions
- installed 38.8.0 debs with gdebi
- I then locked the files in synaptic and reinstalled ubuntu-mate-desktop
Thunderbird now completely works again. Does anyone have a comments or similar experience to share?
I appreciate my version of Ubuntu-Mate is not the latest, and I will be upgrading soon. I will post back with my future experience.
Chris
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Since you had a working clone, maybe you could have tried copying the whole ~/.thunderbird config directory from the “good” machine to the “bad” one?
Apologies for late response - I have been called away.
I don’t want to mess with the other machine - my wife uses it and the support calls don’t bear thinking about 
More seriously, I hadn’t thought of doing that. If the issue reoccurs when I upgrade, I will try it.
Chris
Well, I eventually got round to recovering from this strange effect (that the display for Address books was completely blank, not even the default was shown). I have no idea what caused it.
I belatedly upgraded from 16.04 to 16.10 today and despite locking the old working 38.x Thunderbird packages in Synaptic, the upgrade replaced them with 45.7.0.
I reckoned there was something in the profile which was upsetting the newer versions, so I set about manually migrating the Thunderbird user data into a new profile. In case it’s useful to someone else, here are the steps I took:
Because I was doing the 16.04 to 16.10 upgrade I’d made a complete machine backup using fsarchiver running in SysresCD. Also, my system automatically rsyncs everything on to another disk in the middle of the night, which won’t get changed until tonight so I had two backups.
I have a number of POP3 mailboxes and a couple of IMAP accounts
- I ran thunderbird and switched off all the email account server checking for incoming email. That’s so I don’t read a new incoming email into a trial version of thunderbird which I later delete and hence lose the email
- I renamed the /home/chris/.thunderbird directory to /home/chris/.thunderbird.14Mar17
- I used Synaptic to remove thunderbird and the lightning calendar extension
- I used Synaptic to install a fresh version of thunderbird and the lightning calendar extension. This created a new empty profile.
- I ran thunderbird and said no to offers to set up email accounts. Looking in the address book, I could see empty default address books, so far so good
- I replaced files abook.mab and history.mab in /home/chris/.thunderbird/.default with the same files from my .14Mar17 version
- I replaced the calendar-data directory and contents in /home/chris/.thunderbird/.default with the same directory from my .14Mar17 version
- I replaced the file prefs.js in /home/chris/.thunderbird/.default with the same file from my .14Mar17 version
- I ran thunderbird and said no to offers to set up email accounts. Looking in the address book, I could see both my address books, and the calendar worked ok.
Now on to getting the email transferred
- I replaced the Mail and ImapMail directories and contents in /home/chris/.thunderbird/.default with the same directory from my .14Mar17 version. [Whilst messing about, I’d managed to change the ownership of some of the sub-directories to root, running chown -R chris .default as root fixed that. You shouldn’t have to do that, but I’m recording exactly what I did]
- Started thunderbird and everything was there. I tried each email account in turn and had to re-enter their passwords, ticking the box to store in password manager as I went along. I re-eneabled the mailbox checking/downloading. One of the IMAP accounts is at Yahoo.co.uk and that wouldn’t give me an opportunity to enter a new password. I logged into their webpage to make sure I’d got the password right, and there was an email there to say they’d detected an unusual login attempt. Running thunderbird after that gave me the password request ok.
It looks like it’s ok again 
Chris
2 Likes
Now on to getting the email transferred