Comment 21 for bug 75286

i updated to thunderbird 2 at the same time, so here is what i did:

download http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ thunderbird2 and unzip it. copy the content (!) of the folder to your home into ./mozilla-thunderbird. open a shell and change to the mozilla-thunderbird directory. then type in ./thunderbird (not as root!). now you can leave thunderbird again and run it with ./thunderbird -ProfileManager . now create a new profile and just chose your old profile folder under "change folder". than prof that *all* files in your profile are owned by you, not root (use nautilus or ls -lha). make changes if necessary (e.g. by "chown you thefile"). run ./thunderbird.

thats all :-) please let me know if this does not work for you.