Thunderbird data

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I’m posting on here because there is no response on the Thunderbird forum, however the fact that Thunderbird is now a Flatpak is relevant.

I’ve just installed Fedora-36 on a clean disk and copied the data from my old disk. When I have done this in the past Thunderbird used to find my profile and therefore the emails. Now it doesn’t, and copying the .thunderbird directory or the .default profile to /home/chris/.thunderbird doesn’t work either.

I tried Copying the .thunderbird directory from old computer onto new computer no longer works. | Thunderbird Support Forum | Mozilla Support, but “On your destination computer Locate the “Profile Folder” entry, then click Open Directory.” doesn’t do anything.

Now Thunderbird won’t even start, I just get “Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.”

I suspect that the last time I did this successfully Thunderbird was an RPM package and it has since changed to a Flatpak, which probably means that data files are located somewhere different. I need to delete the lot, install Thunderbird again, then copy the data files to the Flatpak location. With a deb package you can use “purge”, is there a Flatpak equivalent? If not which directories should I delete and where should I copy the profile file afterwards?

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Instructions about migrating TB data from non-flatpak to flatpak are provided here. Note this is related to Flathub version of Thunderbird while Fedora provides separate Thunderbird flatpak for which those may not apply.

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It enabled me to start Thunderbird and create a new profile, surprisingly that was in ~ not the Flatpak directory. It still wasn’t possible to switch to my profile using Thunderbird. I deleted the new profile and changed the name of my profile to that. It fooled Thunderbird, so I now have my emails back. Thanks!