Is it safe to share permissions.sqlite and content_prefs.sqlite accross thunderbold profiles?
I have Thunderbird in different computers and in each of them there is a different whitelist of emails and sits for displaying remote content. I wish that my computers would share that list so to have the same behavior in all of them (i.e. versus keep entering emails and websites over and over again). I learned that the information is stored in the two sqlite files listed in the title, so I thought it would be a good idea to have them in a shared storage and create pointers in each computer (i.e., ln -s ...). However, I am afraid that this might break other things since I am not sure what else depends from those files. A plus of doing it is that one could save the whitelist and not have to enter manually for every new installation.
All Replies (5)
Absolutely a bad idea. And if a problem develops that breaks your system you will be out of luck. Further, none of the files in your Thunderbird profile should be shared.
Wayne, thanks! Any ideas on how to avoid manually entering all the whitelist records when starting a new profile? In other words, any way of saving and restoring the whitelist?
Assuming both systems view mostly the same type of mail interms of content and source systems (senders), in theory you could do the Junk training one PC and periodically copy it to the other PC(s).
While it's possible, if not recommended, to store a profile in a location that can be accessed from different computers, I don't think you risk anything negative by manually copying the two sqlite files from one computer to another. Just make backups of the files before copying in the other ones. Obviously, this isn't as convenient as having a fully synced set of whitelists, but for the purposes of setting up a new system, it's probably harmless, and could save a lot of configuration time.
You can of course replicate the entire setup by copying the Thunderbird (or.thunderbird) folder from one computer to another.
sfhowes, Wayne, Thanks for your help on this. I did "partially" solved my problem by copying the two files between the two different computers, while keeping the old versions with a different name there as a backup. My question was whether having it centralized (i.e. via a separate location) would be too risky. From Wayne's answer and from my own knowledge/experiments on this, doing a cloud-like solution would bring a number of issues that clearly make it a bad idea. However, all things equal (e.g. two copies of the same profile) I can paste the two files from one profile to the other, which saves me from manually writing the whitelist (e.g. in a new setup). As sfhowes mentioned, this is not as convenient as my ultimate goal of shared whitelist but does save a lot of time in new setups. Also, given that the two computers (desktop and a notebook, each sharing three Linux distros) use the same profile (i.e. the same accounts setup), then adding the files just to one computer and periodically copy the files to the other computer would get me closer to the goal of a shared whitelist. In the end, I am now happy for having a way of keeping my whitelist common to both computers, even though the ideal would be to automate this process by having a shared whitelist (versus manually copying the files periodically). I think it is fair to consider the question as solved, although the issue is not really fully addressed.