Thunderbird: nsemail and nscopy files left in /tmp

Question

I am using Thunderbird 68 on Debian.

For any email that I send, Thunderbird creates temp files in /tmp:

/tmp/nsmail.tmp
/tmp/nsmail-1.tmp
/tmp/nsmail-2.tmp
/tmp/nscopy.tmp
/tmp/nscopy-1.tmp

Not only are these files not deleted after the email is send, worse still they stay there after Thunderbird is closed.

I have found a bug report both on Ubuntu and Bugzilla, but no solution.

I find it a very bad practice that the temp file is not deleted immediately after email has been sent. And absolutely outrageous, that even application exit does not clean up its temp files.

As a workaround, can I change the location where these temp files are created ? For instance, using ~/.cache/thunderbird/ would be more appropriate.

Answer 1

This bug was introduced in v68.x and it is not yet fixed. After investigation here is the exact situation:

Bug detail:

Thunderbird do use ~/tmp/ns* since earlier version when sending email, but it also do delete those temporary files just after using them, while tb is still open. On v68.x a coding mistake make thunderbird try to delete those temporary files on the location /tmp/ns... instead of ~/tmp/ns... thus setting $TMPDIR variable to /tmp fix the issue. (awaiting an upstream update)

Solution:

Using the following command to run Thunderbird will fix the issue (similar to the other answer)

export TMPDIR=/tmp; thunderbird;

Answer 2

This bug was introduced in v68.x and it is not yet fixed, awaiting this to be fixed here is a workaround, note that tmp/ns* files are required for TB v68 to work correctly.

Workaround I:

As suggested on the comments a custom temporary file can be used, you can then apply different restrictions to that specific temporary folder, also note that the environment variable changes does not need to be applied widely.

Edit the .desktop file used to run Thunderbird (usually under /usr/share/applications) by changing the Exec= line to the following command or launch Thunderbird with the given command:

export TMPDIR=/home/my/new/tmpdir; export TMP=$TMPDIR; thunderbird; rm -rf /home/my/new/tmpdir/ns*

This will set $TMPDIR and $TMP variable to a custom location, then Thunderbird is run and finally when it's closed rm -rf /home/my/new/tmpdir/ns* will delete tmp leftover.

Note that env. variable changes will just affect Thunderbird if this is ran from a bash or .desktop file. Otherwise if this command is ran directly from a terminal changes to $TMP will affect commands launched after this command.

Workaround II:

We can use a script to do the job manually while Thunderbird is used; To do so we would edit the .desktop file with the following:

Exec=env TMPDIR=/tmp /usr/bin/thunderbird & /path/to/watch-tb-script.sh

Where cat watch-tb-script.sh would be:

#!/bin/sh

[[ $(ps all -e | grep thunderbird | grep -v color | grep -v grep) ]]
while [[ "$?" == 0 ]] 
do
  for i in /tmp/ns*; do 
    if [ -f "$i" ]; then 
      rm -rf $i;
      sleep 10s; 
    fi;
  done;
  sleep 60s;
  [[ $(ps all -e | grep thunderbird | grep -v color | grep -v grep) ]]
done;

This script will keep running while thunderbird is opened, check for /tmp/ns* files and do remove each file every 10 sec then the script will sleep 60 sec before the next check.