Thunderbird on 20.10 is broken

[Bret Busby]

On 28/10/2020, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 at 15:38, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> I do not know whether the package maintainer(s) for Thunderbird for
>> Ubuntu, subscribe to this list, but, Thunderbird on UbuntuMATE 20.10
>> does not load, but instead, displays an error message;
>
> Try turning off the welcome page?
>
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1016648
>

Now, here's where the bug gets more complicated.

I went to that link, and tried to follow the instructions.

However, ...

For expediency, I had added the Thunderbird icon (along with various
others) to the panel, for quicker launching.

Upon right clicking (non-dominant mouse button) on the icon in the
panel, a menu is displayed, which has various options (of which I was
not previously aware), including Launch, Contacts, and Compose New
Message. The second and third of those, will load, and display, as
expected for normal operation. The first; Launch, fails, raising the
previously cited error message.

So, the only way to access the Edit -> Preferences , as described in
the article above, is to select the second or third of those menu
options.

But, for each of the second and third options, while selecting the
option, loads and displays, as expected for normal operation, upon
selecting the option, and then Edit, that reacts as expected, but, as
soon as Preferences is subsequently selected, the same error as
previously cited, is raised. The difference here, is that, upon
closing the error notification box, the option (Contacts or Compose
New Message) is still apparently operational, whereas, in trying to
load the Thunderbird application (as opposed to one of its functions),
the application crashes, or, fails to load, instead, only displaying
the error notification.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............