Command line arguments - Thunderbird

Thunderbird supports the following command line arguments:

• All of the Mozilla command line arguments that aren't browser specific. Notice the syntax section at the bottom of that writeup. You can use -compose message_options to have it bring up the compose message window and fill in everything for you, but you still need to press the Send button to actually send the message.

• Command line arguments for the extension manager. Its used for a number of troubleshooting or system administration tasks such as running in safe mode.

• A "-profile profile_location" command line argument to specify the location of the profile. Its used to run Thunderbird with the specified profile regardless of whether the profile manager knows about that profiles existence. Its described in more detail in the writeup on USB drive support but it does not require a USB drive. Its usefull if you're a roaming user or Thunderbird somehow lost track of your profile (perhaps due to your system crashing) and you want to verify the profile is still good before trying to fix the problem.

Example: Thunderbird -profile e:\my_profile will launch Thunderbird with the profile stored at e:\my_profile. A quick sanity check is that e:\my_profile should contain your prefs.js file.

Normally you can only run one 'full' copy of Thunderbird at the same time. You can use various command line arguments to launch additional copies that startup in a specific window (for example the address book) but you can't navigate to all of the normal windows because its a crippled copy. You can set a environmental variable to let you run two full copies at the same time. This is intended for debugging optimized builds. its not meant for normal use.