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IMAP emails are all addressed by a 32bit UID. Overwriting it would require that you experienced a hash collision, data race, or that your IMAP provider sent out the wrong set of IDs.

It's incredibly unlikely to be Thunderbird's fault.

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I've checked again. Only one letter was corrupt and only Subject line was corrupt. I've chosen to fix folder index from folder properties, and voila! The message was fixed.

It wasn't an overwritten message or IMAP bug, it was some corruption of the Thunderbird folder index.

That index is originally created by your IMAP provider - they sent the wrong set of IDs (usually because of a race condition). When you run a fix, Thunderbird checks to see if the provider screwed anything up. It was an IMAP bug.

Not true. The "folder index" being referred to in Thunderbird is the local .msf database which is constructed by Thunderbird to provide its own local information about messages in the folder. Repairing it means throwing away all the local data and requerying it from the IMAP server (or in the case of a local folder, reparsing the mbox file).

The corruption bug likely lay with Thunderbird and not the IMAP server.

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