Thunderbird - Use Different Profiles

If you're tired of accidentally sending emails from the wrong email address because you have multiple accounts set up in Thunderbird, then you may wish to set up "profiles". Separating your email accounts also allows you to have Thunderbird open only for your work account, so you don't get distracted by notifications for personal emails coming in, but still get notified about incoming work emails.

Related Posts

• Firefox - Using Multiple Profiles

Steps

If you use the following command in your terminal to launch Thunderbird, it will pop up with a window for creating/switching between profiles.

thunderbird -P

Once you have your profiles set up, you can just create executable commands in one of your $PATH locations, in order to launch Thunderbird in the profile you wish. For example, I have a command called thunderbird-personal which runs the following:

thunderbird -P personal

Your PATH

• Executable files in your $PATH locations will be commands that you can auto-complete in your terminal.
• You can make a file executable by just running chmod +x $FILENAME_HERE
• You can use a shebang to the top of your script to tell your computer what to execute the script in. E.g. #!/bin/bash, or #!/usr/bin/php
• You can see what folders are in your $PATH by executing echo $PATH.
• You may wish to make a folder of personal commands somewhere like $HOME/commands, and add this to your path by adding the following to your .bashrc file:

if [ -d "$HOME/commands" ] ; then
  PATH="$HOME/commands:$PATH"
fi