Thunderbird mi sporca tutta la casa

<p>## Thunderbird littering my home</p><p>June 04, 2026 | 1 minute read | 289 words | 234.06 kB</p><p>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`.</p><p>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/`.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>`~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish`:</p><p>`#!/usr/bin/fish`</p><p>`inotifywait -m -e create ~/. | while read FILE`</p><p>`echo $FILE`</p><p>`if test -d &#x27;thunderbird&#x27;;`</p><p>`rmdir &#x27;thunderbird&#x27;;`</p><p>`end`</p><p>`end`</p><p>The above will watch my home directory. Whenever a directory called “thunderbird“ is created, it is immediately removed. But I don’t want to run it by hand and have an open terminal all the time, so I create a systemd user service:</p><p>`~/.config/systemd/user/watch-thunderbird-dir.service`:</p><p>`[Unit]`</p><p>`Description=Watch and remove thunderbird directory`</p><p>`After=network.target`</p><p>`[Service]`</p><p>`Type=simple`</p><p>`ExecStart=/home/me/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish`</p><p>`Restart=always`</p><p>`RestartSec=2`</p><p>`[Install]`</p><p>`WantedBy=default.target`</p><p>Systemd user services need absolute paths, so adjust “me” with your username and start and enable the service:</p><p>`$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish`</p><p>`$ systemctl --user daemon-reload`</p><p>`$ systemctl --user enable --now watch-thunderbird-dir.service`</p><p>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.</p>