I've been hit by that bug, although it only deletes mail AFAIK. There's a separate bug that completely corrupts the mail database on compaction, making Thunderbird lock up including for every future launch.
Its a beautiful open source effort but products that have bugs like that languish for 10-20 years just aren't reliable. I need my mail client to be reliable.
Yes, FUD and long held myths can be found anywhere. But speaking as a staff member and someone who has seen first hand user reports, here is some straight shooting:
* there are rare cases of a profile either misplaced (exists but not correctly pointed to) or gone - it is something which I understand Firefox people are working on (Thunderbird uses the Firefox profile system)
* there are extremely rare reports where prefs.js is corrupted
* there are no compact failures in current versions - there are no open bug reports for recent versions, so it has been totally obliterated by a rewrite and subsequent fixes. Most user reports of compact failure are attributed to other causes of folder corruption
* folder corruption can occur as easily from external sources as from product bugs.
Also, beware drawing broad conclusions about other users' experience from one's own personal experience. I have almost never experienced corruption - once in the last 10 years. But I am also using a Thunderbird profile that has gone through 5 different laptops, two different OS, using daily builds, which is AMPLE opportunity to have had multiple catastrophic failures. But because I know other users experiences I consider myself lucky.
Although in recent years it looks like it turned from a bug about one specific (never resolved) issue to a more general troubleshooting session related to data loss issues.
I used to maintain a mailbox in dropbox that tended to work across my mac, linux and windows environments... it was pretty great... at some point a few incompatible releases across the environments broke everything and had other bugs that I could no longer revert from. I pretty much haven't touched it in a while.
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