new email addresses not saved
 

I have my email on a separate partition so that my email doesn't get destroyed when I do new linux installs (I have emails from 5 years ago now). I also keep my sylpheed email addressbooks. This partition is writable by anybody and I have also made my user the owner of this partition during each linux install (media/email). When I set up sylpheed I tell it that my email is in /media/email and then it is able to write incoming messages to that location.

The problem I am having is that I make symbolic links for my addressbooks from ~/.sylpheed* to /media/email using this:

cd ~/.sylpheed*
rm addrbook-000001.xml
ln -s /media/email/addrbook-000001.xml addrbook-000001.xml

Sylpheed finds my addressbook ok on my email partition but changes that symbolic link to a file on ~ when it writes new addresses. What am I doing wrong...I want it to write new addresses to my email partition?

I've seen a few programs that remove soft links where they expect a file
to be. The easiest work-around for this may be something you'd be interested
in doing anyway. Why not put your entire home directory on this partition?
That would let sylpheed use a real file and it would ensure you keep all
of your user files the next time you upgrade. The only possible drawback
would be if you need more disk space for your home directory than you have
on the partition.

I have my home partition on a separate partition from / and have plenty of space. When I upgrade, though, wouldn't newer programs not like the old config files in /home/tux?

That's usually not a problem, since most programs are written to be
aware of pre-existing configuration files from an earlier version.

If you do run into issues after installing a new program, you can
usually find and delete the configuration files. The next time
the program starts it will create a new set of files with the
default settings.

that would make things a whole lot easier-I'll start doing that and then I won't have to spend time setting up a new linux system every couple months!