I ran an strace on thunderbird this time. It was far longer until it crashed (15 minutes or so), but it still caved eventually. It crashed whilst thunderbird was not being actively used. It was working perfectly fine up until that point (you can even see in the strace the arrival of the two automated bug emails this bug report has sent to me).
** Attachment added: "Thunderbird strace" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15756995/Thunderbird%20strace -- Memory Corruption (?) in thunderbird https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/244850 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
