I use thunderbird as my main electronic mail system. It works and does the job really well for pretty much any number of accounts which is quite practical.

As things progress, though I run into problems and need to find solutions and here are some of these.

My signature is not working

Email systems have been around for about 50 years now. One of the features that was added along the way was a signature. Old mail system would try to read a file named ~/.signature (where ~ means your user home directory, generally defined in $HOME).

This has been working for ages and Thunderbird would use that file by default too.

Now, you can have many accounts meaning that one file doesn't cut it well. You probably want different signatures for different accounts. So in the settings you have a place were you can enter the name of your signature file. Quite practical and you can make it non-hidden and maybe in a folder named emails or signatures to better organized your files.

Only, in Ubuntu 24.04, my signature did not work for a while. Looking at the settings, the path was different. So I tried to fix the path to my normal signature file under $HOME. That did not work. I restarted Thunderbird, just in case. No dice.

Then I thought that I probably have another case of "forbidden directory" because Thunderbird is now a snap package. That was correct. The funny folder I noticed above was actually under my snap folder:

/home/alexis/snap/thunderbird/...

and sure enough, I copied my signature there and now it works:

cp -i ~/.signature.html /home/alexis/snap/thunderbird/common/signature.html

Notice that I copied it non-hidden (the destination filename does not start with a period). This makes it easier because the Browse File system used in Thunderbird does not show hidden files. This way I can use that selector and just click on the filename.

Issue Fixed.