How to run a second Thunderbird instance with an seperate home folder on Linux?

Have you ever wondered how you can start a separate instance of Thunderbird that uses its own home directory? But why?

As you've probably noticed, every instance of Thunderbird creates a new profile in /home/USER/.thunderbird. You normally cannot change this directory.

But maybe you want to better separate your mail accounts from each other or you want to store certain mail accounts in a different partition or an encrypted container.

But there is a solution: Start Thunderbird via bash script and set the $HOME variable to a different directory like so:

start-thunderbird.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Set new home directory
HOME=/home/USER/encrypted-folder/home

# Start Thunderbird
# Just download Thunderbird, extract it and use its binary for starting a new instance
./path/to/thunderbird/thunderbird

This way you can start a new Thunderbird instance without messing up your existing .thunderbird folder. In the above example all data will be stored inside /home/USER/encrypted-folder/home/.thunderbird instead of /home/USER/.thunderbird

You can also mount encrypted LUKS containers and use this approach to store all your Thunderbird data securely in there.

Title image: https://pixabay.com/de/photos/briefkasten-mauer-post-postkasten-1819966/