Thunderbird Snap on Local Network

[waverider]

I am rapidly getting over snap but it looks like we are stuck with it.

Thunderbird is my mail client and I use a network server to store and access mail via my local network. Amongst other frustrating faults for which the seems to be no resolution, Thunderbird creates folders in /run/user/1000/doc and /run/user/1000/doc/by-app when accessing the share to deal with emails. Most of these folders are empty with names like 79f0b375. They build up and appear useless. I am unable to delete them even using sudo rmdir.

How do I get rid of them and stop them being created?

Thanks.

[jlittle]

(I use the thunderbird download with gmail, but I don't get /run entries for it. I do get them for Chromium, which is from flathub.)

/run isn't a real filesystem, and presents data about running daemons and the like. I imagine that the "share" is samba or NFS, and the /run entries come from their daemons.

/run is cleared out, or rather disappears, on shutdown. Why worry about it? I suppose it might be a symptom of some subsystem's daemons proliferating unnecessarily, in which case the proliferating daemons is the problem, not the /run entries.

[waverider]

Thanks for the response John, it's appreciated.
The share is NFS.
I don't understand how /run can disappear on shutdown when it is taking up 45Gb of space and appears exactly the same on startup? Nearly all the space is being consumed by the /run/user/1000/doc directory which contains these folders which I cannot delete? That much disc space is a worry.
It would seem to me that snap may copy the data from the server to the local machine, then perhaps saves changes back either when it is changed or on shutdown. The data on the server is certainly updated as it is current when accessed from another non-snap version of Thunderbird on another computer. I'm not sure of how or why this operates in this manner?

[jlittle]

...when it is taking up 45Gb of space...

It isn't a real file system; no space is taken up in storage, like /proc and /sys. The entries may be maps in to the 64 bit virtual address space, but I don't think one can say how the entries are used.

45 GB seems excessive, though. I have de-snapped (begrudging the real storage the snap subsystem took, and how it bloated my backups) and /run shows as 5.2 MB. I wonder what other users that have snaps see in /run.

[Snowhog]

5.2M on my Desktop PC (Kubuntu 24.04).

[waverider]

Thanks for the responses. I am now totally confused. If no space is taken up in storage why do i only have 5Gb left on a 112Gb hard drive with /run showing 45Gb?
Some further explanation:

When I enter the Local Directory path to the remote server into Thunderbird:
/media/netserver/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Profiles/8i6rf48w.default/Mail/mail.mydomain.com
it then converts this path to:
/run/user/1000/doc/1d6856f4/mail.mydomain.com
It then copies all the files from the server (11.3Gb) to two folders:
/run/user/1000/doc/1d6856f4/mail.mydomain.com
and
/run/user/1000/doc/by-app/snap.thunderbird/1d6856f4/mail.mydomain.com

This of course now totals 22.6Gb

The excess folders in /run/user/1000/doc/1d6856f4/mail.mydomain.com and /run/user/1000/doc/by-app/snap.thunderbird/1d6856f4/mail.mydomain.com cannot have permissions altered or be deleted by sudo but are taking up another 22Gb of space.

How can I remove them to free up space and why is this happening?