I am running Ubuntu 12.04.

I had /home on its own drive and that drive was getting SMART warnings.

I backed my data up, replaced the drive, restored, booted and everything seems OK except my Thunderbird filters.

When a message comes in that has a rule to filter to a different folder Thunderbird is now raising an error: "message could not be filtered to folder because writing to folder failed". There was a bug but it is being reported as repaired on 2014-10-14. And the only platform mentioned is Windows.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=931303

Now, the messages are going to my Inbox just fine, and I can manually drag them and drop them into the folder that I want them filtered to. So I conclude that this is not a permission problem.

Best I could find with Google is that Mozilla suggests that the way to go is to create a profile and move all my existing data to the new profile.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Thunderbird

This seems like a Royal pain the kester.

Before I undertake this this, I thought I solicit ideas as to possible solutions that are less onerous.

Thanks

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain