Restarting the e-mail program "Thunderbird" after crash

Problem description

The e-mail program "Thunderbird" has been terminated unexpectedly. Restarting the program is not possible or is not successful, i.e. the program exits without being fully started. An error message of the following type is displayed:

Fehlermeldung im Programm Thunderbird

Possible cause

At startup, the program creates so-called lock files. These prevent Thunderbird from being started more than once under the same user. On normal termination of the mail program, the files are deleted. In case of a crash the files are still present.

Solution

Step 1

If you have one of the browsers "Mozilla Firefox" or "Mozilla" open at the moment, please close it.

2nd step

Open a text console or a terminal, under KDE you can find it under: Start Menu > Utilities > Terminal. All the following commands should be entered into the terminal.

Step 3.

Check if there are still processes of "Thunderbird" running on your computer by entering the following commands and kill them:

  • ps -A | egrep "thunderbird|run-mozilla.sh"
  • kill -9 process numbers

Note: If no process numbers are displayed after entering the upper ps command, the kill command is not necessary.

There should be no "Thunderbird" processes running on your computer now.

Step 4

The lock files must be deleted manually by the user. The following procedure is recommended for this:

  • Change to the directory where the configuration files of Thunderbird are located:
    • cd ~
    • cd .mozilla-thunderbird (on some systems: cd .thunderbird)
    • ls
  • A directory name consisting of a combination of numbers and letters is displayed. This directory name is to be used in the following cd command.
    • cd number and letter combination
  • Delete the files lock and .parentlock. Note the dot before the second file name, i.e.
    • rm lock
    • rm .parentlock

Now you can close the console again and Thunderbird should start as usual.

Example

Note that the process numbers 9748, 9759, and 9766 that appear here will be different for you, as will the directory name, which here is bs8tjiee.default.

Programmfenster in Thunderbird