Linux or Thunderbird?

[coffeecat]

@ TheFu - Point taken, but the "ntfs-config" GUI programme in my link is available from the Software Manager, so I would have thought it was trustworthy?

A few years ago, I used to regularly help users who got into a pickle with that particular GUI app. My main advice then: don't use it! I don't think there has ever been a GUI app for helping with mounting ntfs filesystems that hasn't exhibited serious problems. I agree with TheFu. There is no substitute for learning to manually configure /etc/fstab. It's not actually that hard.

A more general point. The howto you linked to is almost 7 years old. That is old. Linux-based operating systems develop fast, and there have been many important changes in the last few years. If you must surf the internet for howtos and tutorials be wary of ones that are not recent, and please be aware that there is a lot of stuff out there which is just plain bad. Just because it sounds good and is well presented visually does not necessary mean it is technically trustworthy.

Last point - you are welcome to post your questions here, but our main focus is Ubuntu and the official flavours. Mint is derived from Ubuntu, but is not Ubuntu, nor one of the official flavours. Mint has their own forum, here: https://forums.linuxmint.com/ It's an excellent forum. You might find it useful. Some of our regulars here are also regulars there.

I'm sorta surprised that NTFS can be used for any thunderbird profile data. Permissions on files and directories matter in Linux, so using a file system that doesn't support permissions just doesn't make sense.

Yes it is surprising, but it does work. Or, at least it did when I last tried what I think the OP is trying to achieve. I had a dual-boot with Windows and Ubuntu, and a shared Data partition formatted ntfs. I put my thunderbird config files in a ".thunderbird" folder inside a "home-configs" folder on the ntfs Data partition, and then simply created a "~/.thunderbird" symlink to the hidden folder in the ntfs partition. If I upgraded Ubuntu by making a fresh installation instead of do-release-upgrade, I simply had to create the ~/.thunderbird symlink in the new installation and carry on as before.

Once, in a fit of masochistic enthusiasm, I found where the Windows equivalent of ~/.thunderbird was and created whatever Windows calls their equivalent of a symlink to .thunderbird in the ntfs partition. Gratifyingly, it worked, and I was able to alternate between Windows and Ubuntu, open thunderbird in whichever OS I was working and update my thunderbird data ad lib, and then find the new data in the "other" OS.

Those days are gone. I have abandoned Windows, and you'll be glad to hear that my Data partition is now formatted ext4.

[driveyousteadybor]

O.K. - I'm suitably chastised! Now that I know NTFS partitions aren't automatically mounted on startup - and having discovered there's a "Mount/Unmount" option in the right click menu under "Computer" - I have just tried booting first into Windows, then re-booting into Mint and mounting both those volumes first. Thunderbird then started up fine. It's not the best solution, but for now, I'm happy with it. I also noticed that an SD card I always have inserted in the laptop WAS mounted on startup - is this because FAT32 is a common format used by all systems? Maybe I'll revisit the posts about editing the config file at a later date, and I'll check out the Mint forum as well.

[TheFu]

FAT32 is a foreign file system, like NTFS and exFAT. The drivers run in userland and are slow due to the extra layers necessary to access the storage.
Native Linux storage has kernel-level drivers and are much faster.

We all have to make compromises to access non-native storage.