Category: Thunderbird Email Client

Added: 24th of October 2019

Viewed: 3,319 times

Linux, Thunderbird is already running but not responding error

I recently reinstalled Ubuntu Mate, and copied over my Thunderbird profile from my USB stick back to the .thunderbird directory under my home folder.

I then started Thunderbird and received the following error.


I first checked to see if Thunderbird was still running in the background by running top from the terminal, but couldn't see any Thunderbird processes running. I also ran the following command just to make sure.

killall thunderbird


I also restarted the machine, but the error still occurred when I tried to launch Thunderbird.

I then decided to check the permissions of the folders, and noticed they where owned by root.



I then opened my terminal and ran the following command and changed the permissions of the folders and files to my username.

Replace username:username with your own username
sudo chown -R username:username /home/username/.thunderbird/


I then started Thunderbird again and was able to access to emails again.