Emacs will not paste into other programs

I'd suggest reporting this to the upstream developers.

How do I do that.

The standard way to report an Emacs bug is to run M-x report-emacs-bug and describe the problem. However, you might also want to look at http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/ to see if this is already reported.

This is a general guideline. If you are uncomfortable with these steps, perhaps somebody else could step up as a contact towards the Emacs maintainers on your and Ubuntu's behalf. I can volunteer to take the first steps, but cannot commit to being able to follow up on a longer term. In any event, I feel that this needs to be hashed out in some more detail before we take that step.

Confusingly, Emacs on X has two different places where you copy and paste stuff. M-w uses Emacs' internal kill ring (kill-ring-save), whereas the Edit menu's copy command uses the X clipboard (clipboard-kill-ring-save). This is well known, and probably pointless to report as a bug. I also think it is known that clipboard-kill-ring-save is slower than kill-ring-save. See also (the somewhat technical) http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste (grab bag of related things, in no particular order; that's a wiki for you), http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2006/10/22/emacs-copypaste-and-x/ for a recent rehash, and of course the GNU Emacs manual.

However; it could be argued that for GTK interoperability reasons, the GTK version of Emacs in particular should behave differently than traditional GNU Emacs on X11. I can imagine that this would be a hard thing to agree on, but also that this might be worth bringing up one way or another. I'm not sure a bug report to the Emacs maintainers is the correct way to approach that, though.

Oh, and http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA-Bindings.html

http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1765

Hello Peter.
Thanks for submitting this bug and reporting a problem with pasting into Thunderbird.

You made this bug report in 2009 regarding Thunderbird and there have been several versions of Thunderbird since then.

Could you confirm that this is no longer a problem and that we can close the ticket? Or, if it is still a problem, could you come to Launchpad and make a comment to that effect?

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu and Thunderbird better.

G