Thunderbird Profiles

To support my recent effort to reclaim me time, I split my Thunderbird configuration into two profiles. Personal and work profiles.

After a couple of test passes I had two profiles after an hour or so. The basic sequence of steps was something like this:

1. Close Thunderbird.
2. Disable networking.
3. Perform backups.
4. Create a new profile named work.
5. Copy the current profile contents to the new profile.
6. Start Thunderbird with each profile.
7. Delete unrelated accounts in each profile.
8. Delete the unrelated calendar from each profile.
9. In the new work profile define a new Local Folders location.
10. Create a new ~/.local/share/applications/mozilla-thunderbird-work.desktop file.
11. Edit the panel menu.
12. Restore networking.
13. Test each profile.

I wanted to visually distinguish the two profiles.

I tested several themes but found them too harsh and disruptive to my eyes. I settled for the Light theme that is packaged with Thunderbird. To further distinguish the two profiles, I added the following to the work profile user.js

user_pref("browser.display.background_color", "#ECECEC");

I added the following to the work profile userChrome.css:

    /* Folder pane & Message pane color */
    treechildren {
    background-color: #ECECEC !important; }

I changed the work profile toolbar to Icons besides Text and the personal profile to Icon and Text.

In all the process went well. Now for some “me time.”

Posted: October 18, 2019 Category: Usability Tagged: Thunderbird

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