Desktop Email Client – How to Fix Mozilla Thunderbird When Crashing

Is your Mozilla Thunderbird email client crashing all of a sudden? I upgraded Thunderdbird to 31.2.0 and noticed it started crashing. I’m not sure if this was a coincidence.

Perhaps upgrading caused my Thunderbird profile to become corrupted or just happen chance. Anyhow, I’m using Ubuntu 12.04 on this computer with this problem. I’m going to show you how I quickly resolved this issue.

First, I tried starting Thunderbird with a different user account, in this case I ran it as root. I no longer received this crash error. Next, I renamed my .thunderbird directory in Ubuntu to .thunderbird.old.

Desktop Email Client

I started Thundebird email client and it opened correctly. However, it was a generic profile with no email accounts. To fix this issue I went into my old Thunderbird email client profile that I had renamed and then copied all data from a xxxx.default folder.

I pasted that data into a new xxxxx.default folder, created in .thunderbird. When prompted I choose to over write all existing files. I started Thunderbird and this time all my email accounts were working properly.

Hopefully, these steps will help you get your crashing Thunderbird email client working properly again.