I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, witnessed many major and minor changes in the software. I started using it on my Windows XP system. Over time I have shifted to Linux. However, Thunderbird is still my preferred email client.
I save my Thunderbird folder in the Application Data folder on Windows or the .thunderbird folder on Linux as backup. When I use the folders on a fresh installation of the same OS, things are simple. However, when I use the Linux files in Windows Application Data and vice versa, I still get my configuration and folders. Therein lies the robustness and power of Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is able to restore my configuration and folders perfectly; but the configuration for plugins does not get restored in a similar manner. The reason for this is plugin management is part of the internals of the software and it is not completely platform independent. As it happened, when I tried using my Windows backup for my Linux installation of Thunderbird, I was not able to install any plugins. Actually, my package management showed that the plugin was installed but Thunderbird did not. Thunderbird showed that the only plugin I had was bdToolbar which is the plugin for BitDefender Toolbar which I had on my Windows installation. So, it was clear to me that Windows configurations of plugins were still there and were blocking fresh configuration of plugins. So, I just deleted the extensions.rdf file and restarted Thunderbird to get my fresh plugin collection.
Well extensions.rdf is kind of internal registry of Thunderbird for its plugins. It was regenerated from existing plugins when I restarted Thunderbird and things were just as I wanted.
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