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Thunderbird littering my home

June 04, 2026 | 1 minute read | 289 words | 234.06 kB

I’ve recently rediscovered Thunderbird, but it has developed a bug, apparently because of recent XDG changes which added a new type of projects directory. The bug means that any time I start Thunderbird, it creates a directory ~/thunderbird.

I suppose I should be glad it’s in lowercase

The directory is useless. It remains empty, and Thunderbird already uses an old-style ~/.thunderbird for configuration and data, instead of respectively under the standard ~/.config/ and ~/.local/share/.

I don’t have the time to build the knowledge to fix this bug. I am, however, on record for finding applications that make directories in my home, intended or not, impolite and inconsiderate, so this will not stand.

In the rest of this post I will use the fish(1) shell as well as systemd(1), so if you use different tools, adjust as needed.

~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish:

#!/usr/bin/fish inotifywait -m -e create ~/. | while read FILE echo $FILE if test -d 'thunderbird'; rmdir 'thunderbird'; end end

The above will watch my home directory. Whenever a directory called “thunderbird“ is created, it is immediately removed. But I don’t want to run it by hand and have an open terminal all the time, so I create a systemd user service:

~/.config/systemd/user/watch-thunderbird-dir.service:

[Unit] Description=Watch and remove thunderbird directory After=network.target

[Service] Type=simple ExecStart=/home/me/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish Restart=always RestartSec=2

[Install] WantedBy=default.target

Systemd user services need absolute paths, so adjust “me” with your username and start and enable the service:

$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish $ systemctl --user daemon-reload $ systemctl --user enable --now watch-thunderbird-dir.service

If we don’t forget to remove all this once Thunderbird have found time to solve the actual bug, the hack described here will do nicely.