Thunderbird Littering My Home

acabal 31 minutes ago |

Home folder litter is one of my top pet peeves in computing. In fact it's the only reason why I refuse to use snaps on Ubuntu. I don't even care about whatever technical stuff everyone argues about - but snaps create a permanent `~/snap/` directory and Ubuntu devs don't care. There's been a bug report on Launchpad for over a decade[1] and it's the highest voted bug in Ubuntu history, but no, Ubuntu devs think littering the home folder with highly visible system-level machinery is totally unavoidable.

It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

miduil 2 hours ago |

You can skip inotify tools altogether and do use systemd like this to trigger `rm -rf`:

    `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.path`

   [Unit]
   Description=Watch for unwanted ~/thunderbird directory
   

   [Path]
   PathExists=%h/thunderbird
   Unit=remove-thunderbird-dir.service
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=default.target

lomlobon 2 hours ago |

I've long given up on keeping a clean home folder because so many software do this and keeping it clean is a constant chore. Now I just make a real_home folder in my 'home' and put all my actual stuff there. They can use the ~ landfill

Retr0id 17 minutes ago | |

I just never look in ~

neuropacabra 2 hours ago | |

I stopped using that software no matter how painful it was some games included. I wanted to play BG2 and the remake from GOG just litter the Documents folder even when running though Wine. Well, no game for then. Pity. I want my computer to serve me and to have my own files where yo want them.

ryandrake 55 minutes ago | | |

Unfortunately, many applications now treat your filesystem as a dumping ground for their dependencies and caches and config files and temporary data and all kinds of other non-userdata trash they create. This ship has long since sailed :(

yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago | | |

Doesn't WINE let you pick folder mappings?

F3nd0 1 hour ago | | |

It does. Run `winecfg` and see ‘Folders’ under the ‘Desktop Integration’ tab. Wine used to link these to directories in your home directory by default; not sure if that’s still the case, but you can definitely change it.

ddalcino 26 minutes ago |

Reminds me of this other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447935), which suggests the following solution:

If you create your own `~/thunderbird` directory, then Thunderbird will stop littering your home directory.

mzajc 1 hour ago |

There's more! On my machine it creates an empty ~/.mozilla/extensions directory every time it starts, and I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.

create_accounts 38 minutes ago | |

there's a stupid solution that I put in practice out of helplessness. I remove the writing permission on ~ to my user, only sudo can write on ~, so some apps simply fail to launch

the__alchemist 2 hours ago |

There are so many annoyances in TB. I stopped using it after a few days. My primary concerns:

  - Opening an email thread opens multiple (potentially many) tabs, and is difficult to nagivate or understand the flow of messages
  - I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing)
  - Search is unreliable / broken.

roelschroeven 1 hour ago | |

> I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing)

The Compose window by default uses Paragraph style. Change it to Text instead, that works like you want. You can change the default in the settings. Still not ideal because in some cases after certain types of formatting it still reverts to Paragraph style.

Saris 1 hour ago | |

Shift+Enter for a normal new line. No idea why it's like this.

emaro 56 minutes ago | | |

The default paragraph style has some margin.

- You can do Shift+Enter to get a `br` without breaking the paragraph. - You can change the format from "Paragraph" to "Body Text" to remove the margin. Note that Thunderbird changes new lines back to "Paragraph" automatically, so you need to frist write your email, then format it as "Body Text". - Or, you can disable the "Use Paragraph format instead of Body text by default" option in the settings, to always have "Body text".

Saris 48 minutes ago | | |

Good to know.

I've always wondered why HTML editors tend to work this way (Wordpress is the same), instead of having a single enter key be a line break and a double enter key be a paragraph.

F3nd0 1 hour ago | | |

If my understanding is correct, enter by default starts a new paragraph (<p>…</p> in HTML). Holding shift makes it add a line break (<br> in HTML).

I think maybe Thunderbird has a plain text mode where this doesn’t happen, but it’s been a while since I last used it, so I could be completely wrong.

thesuitonym 1 hour ago | | |

Thunderbird does have a plain text mode, and you set it to be the default. Nice thing about TB is that defaulting to plain text doesn't lock you into plain text like a lot of other editors out there--If you add any formatting it silently switches you to HTML email.

Saris 1 hour ago | | |

Ah that would make sense I suppose as it's sending HTML by default.

It does have a plain text mode!

wps 43 minutes ago | |

I agree. I might swap over to a TUI mail client on my desktop. Don’t even get me started on the iOS Mail app.

fph 2 hours ago | |

What did you replace it with?

the__alchemist 1 hour ago | | |

Webmail (Fastmail's official webapp in this case)

sam_lowry_ 2 hours ago | | |

mutt?

create_accounts 40 minutes ago |

I cant stand apps littering my home folder, regardless of if they are invisible folders or whatever. I am looking forward to deleting my operating system, or just the user account, and only installing apps in a virtual machine

daneel_w 1 hour ago |

Try Betterbird. On the whole I find that fork a better experience than Thunderbird.

soperj 1 hour ago | |

What's better for you?

sam_lowry_ 2 hours ago |

Most of the time, you can control where XDG puts its litter, cf. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

Just note that XDG_DESKTOP_DIR and XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR can not point to the same directory or chromium will disregard your config.

P.S. Reader, if you can commit to chromium without much hassle, check this and fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:XDG_user_directories

nixosbestos 2 hours ago | |

You (and other folks...) should probably click-through to the bugzilla links. Yes, normally. But, it looks like some legacy code path near the XDG stuff caused an accidental extra dir creation.

(I was rolling my eye wading in, thinking that Thunderbird was doing XDG and maybe some distro just wasn't setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME correctly, etc, but alas, no it's a TB bug)

butz 1 hour ago |

Is there any hope that Thunderbird might benefit from XDG config directories fix that Firefox recently implemented?

jvyden 1 hour ago |

You're lucky you only get one. I get two, `~/thunderbird/` and `~/Thunderbird/`

gsich 57 minutes ago |

Another unit that requires mental load.

hungryhobbit 1 hour ago |

Seems like with Claude you could have submitted a PR (to actually fix the issue) in the time it took to come up with the hack.

gruez 1 hour ago | |

But there's no guarantee that the PR would get merged.

cassianoleal 1 hour ago | | |

Or worked

tomstockmail 3 minutes ago | | |

There's a patch in the bug report and it appears to be tagged for Thunderbird 153 release.

While I'm here I got to say, it's worrying seeing people not calling out what a bad solution the OP has suggested. Implementing a blind removal of a folder is not good practice. You will forget about this script/unit file. One day you may copy all your Thunderbird data to ~/thunderbird, think you're safe, then boom, it's gone.

Edit: Forgot a key point