Thunderbird Profiles

Thunderbird and Firefox can refuse to launch, claiming falsely that your profile is not available when it can be their directories in your home directories .cache directory. Fix that, and all will work.

Size

Depending on your settings, thunderbird profiles can become very large. A good way to reduce the size of your profile is disable local caching of messages and limit the cache size as follows. These instructions are excerpted from http://kb.mozillazine.org/Minimize_the_size_of_a_profile

Disable local copies

• click on the Edit dropdown menu and select Account Settings...
• for each account, click on Synchronization & Storage
• un-check Keep messages for this account on this computer
• click on OK

Remove local copies

• click on the Edit dropdown menu and select Account Settings...
• for each account, click on Server Settings and copy the Local directory: setting.
• Exit Thunderbird, and delete any files in that directory (and its children) that have the name of a folder but no file extension (mbox files). For example, "inbox." for the inbox folder. Leave the *.msf files alone. The *.sbd files are renamed directories.

Reduce cache size

• click on the Edit pulldown menu and select Preferences
• click on the Advanced heading, and click on the Network & Disk Space tab.
• under Disk Space, set it to use up to 256 MB of space for the cache.
• under Disk Space,check Compact folders when it will save over 20MB (and make sure it is set to 20 MB).
• click on Clear Now
• click on Close