this may have been fixed in Thunderbird 0.9, but I just ran into this severe problem this morning,

Thunderbird version 0.8 (20041007)

Windows 2000 sp4

I'm running antivir antivirus, have been getting some phishing type virus/trojans. Last night thunderbird was working with antivir correctly, the virus/trojans were getting deleted [attachment stripped, sent to quaranteen directory], no problem. Then I added a message filter, this morning when I got more virus/trojan emails, antivir caught them, but when tbird tried moving the email at the same time to the filtered folder, my entire inbox was corrupted, all incoming email was deleted, a thunderbird error box came up saying my inbox msf file had become corrupted, please restrart tbird to rebuild inbox file, during the application of the filter and I had lost all emails in it [only the content of the emails, the emails themselves still appear, sender subject etc, but when I opened any of them there was nothing in them].

I don't think the problem was with antivir, since the same spam/trojan emails from the same source [an infected machine on a list serve] were treated correctly, no problems, only when I added another filter:
"{Listserve name}"
including the curly brackets did this problem arise.

Given that my entire inbox, luckily only 50 or so emails, was lost, I'd rate this as a severe problem.

Unfortunately I hadn't gotten around to updating to 0.9 so it's not possible for me to know if this problem has been fixed, but it's definitely a serious problem.

Keep in mind that Thunderbird is still in beta, just been released at version 0.9, which fixed several bugs in 0.8, but it still has some issues that are significant, so you're taking a chance using it, it's getting better with every release, but losing emails like this is not good, to put it mildly.

For help with Thunderbird bugs, go to Mozillazine.org thunderbird bug forum.
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There's some reading on these types of issues here

However, I consider this also to be a very serious issue, users can't be losing their email inboxes when some glitch happens between the av software and tbird.

I have never ever seen a problem like this with Outlook Express, sorry, but Tbird still has a ways to go, I don't think it's a 0.9 release, it's closer to 0.7, they jumped ahead too fast for my taste I have to admit, losing emails is not like a beta firefox crashing on a website or something, it's money, and time to recover them.

This strikes me as a particularly lame treatment of this question, all email messages are stored in a single file of some sort, that's been the case forever, but other email clients don't have this problem as far as I know, I've never heard it before.

This is a BUG, it's a big bug, and it needs to get fixed. Anything that potentially loses emails for any reason is a very serious bug, a showstopper, a release blocker.
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