The Problem:
As i analysed the problem it occurs only with disk quotas enabled on the partition where your local profile is stored. Disabling quotas with
quotaoff -vau
does fix the problem with tunderbird/icedove. However the problem remains because in the environment i am working with the use of quotas is crucial.
The Solution:
My investigation on how to fix this problem came to the conclusion that there already is a fix for that so I downloaded the latest version of Thunderbird which is 17.0.8.
Untar the package like this:
tar xvfj thunderbird-17.0.8
and move the unpacked folder to a proper location like:
mv thunderbird /usr/local/thunderbird-17.0.8
Change into directory and link thunderbird to icedove.
ln -s /usr/local/thunderbird-17.0.8/thunderbird-bin /usr/local/bin/icedove
Set permissions on the folder:
chown -R root:root /usr/local/thunderbird-17.0.8/ && chmod -R 755 /usr/local/thunderbird-17.0.8
The final steps requires to link you profile to the the folder thunderbird will create.
ln -sf ~/.icedove ~/.thunderbird
Now start thunderbird by typing icedove in the konsole and it starts thunderbird with quotas enabled.