Using several independent instances of Thunderbird

emailthunderbird

As many people, I too have several email accounts. Until now, I have been using Thunderbird for my main account, and either used web interface for the other accounts, or used other email clients (Sylpheed, Balsa, …). For some reason, I never liked the idea of having separate, independent accounts integrated in one email client, perhaps because the added complexity and possibility of confusion. When I used three different email clients, I had three truly independent email accounts.

The only disadvantage is, the other (non-Thunderbird) email clients never worked as well as Thunderbird.

Now I am wondering whether there is a possibility to use three independent instances of Thunderbird, so that I don't have to use inferior email clients.

I know that when Thunderbird is already running, I cannot start another instance. Also, any additional instance would need its own (independent) config directory.

Is there any way to achieve this?

I am using Thunderbird (Icedove 24.6.0) on Debian Wheezy

UPDATE:

I have found this article on MozillaZine, which suggests to use the -no-remote option and does not mention the option -new-instance at all.

The man page lists both options, but does not explain what the difference is, if -new-instance is implied when -no-remote is used, or whether they should both be used at the same time.

thunderbird -P "profile_name" -no-remote
thunderbird -P "profile_name" -new-instance

Side note:

The refered article also says, that:

Multiple instances is intended for debugging, so use it at your own risk

Well, I don't intend to use it for debugging, I want to use it for my work. What can possibly go wrong when using multiple instances? How can I mitigate that danger?

Best Answer

You can start Thunderbird from the commandline with the -P <profile> option to specify a different profile. Within the different profiles you have complete seperation. IIRC specifying a profile implies the -new-instance option when starting thunderbird but if not, just add it.

To create a new profile start thunderbird from the commandline with:

thunderbird -ProfileManager -new-instance

On the other hand, have you tried using the IMAP protocol? This gives me completely different trees of folders one for each account that I have in (one) Thunderbird session. Unless I actively copy messages from one account to the other everything stays separate and as long as you close the tree of the account your are not working on, things should not be confusing.

Related Solutions

Thunderbird: new email notification not working properly

This is an alternative solution to play the sound file and show a notification on the desktop.

Create a small shell script that will contain the commands to be run when a new email arrives:

#!/bin/sh

if [ $1 = true ]; then
    aplay new_mail.wav
    notify-send --icon=icedove Icedove 'There are new emails!'
fi

Save the script and make it executable:

chmod +x /path/to/script.sh

Install the extension FireTray, then go to its settings. On the tab Mail, place the full path to the script in Launch on count change.

Some notes:

The script will be called by FireTray either with the argument true or false. The argument will be true if there's new mail.
aplay comes from the package alsa-utils, and should be installed by default. If you use PulseAudio, you can use paplay instead, from the package pulseaudio-utils, but aplay is supposed to work with PulseAudio too.
notify-send needs the package libnotify-bin.

Automatically send from specific email addresses in Mutt

You can configure mutt to use different from addresses (via your ~/.muttrc), e.g.:

set use_from = yes
set envelope_from = yes
set from = default@example.org
set realname = "Default Realname"
# list of all your addresses
alternates @example\.org$

You can setup some macros to explicitly switch the from before composing a new mail:

macro index \e1 "set from=foo@example.org\n" "Select foo address"
macro index \e2 "set from=bar@example.org\n" "Select bar address"
# ...

When replying to an email, you can configure mutt to automatically use the to-header as from address (this is point 2 from your question):

set reverse_name=yes

Don't reuse the real name - helps when people send you crap like "foo@example.org" <foo@example.org>:

set reverse_realname=no

Then you can set up some hooks to make things depend on header values - e.g. to use different fcc folders:

fcc-hook '~f ^foo@example\.org' '=foo'

(There are also other hooks, like send-hook etc.)

I would look into the hooks to implement something like point 1 from your question. Although, you would need some external scripting to maintain such a database.

Depending on your current MTA setup you may have to change its config as well, i.e. such that it accepts different envelope froms.

It is also possible to use different SMTP relays depending on e.g. the hostname of the envelope from - but this must be configured in the MTA.