I currently have Thunderbird 0.9 and want to upgrade to 1.0. I was wondering if doing an upgrade would erase my email messages? With Firefox I didn't much care because I could get everything that I can potentially lose back. With Thunderbird, I have emails and such that I rather not lose. How do I go about upgrading Thunderbird and ensure I don't lose any messages? Thanks for any help!

All of your settings and messages are stored in ~/.thunderbird so removing the old binaries and installing the new ones should be fine. If you have installed any third party extensions then you may need to upgrade them if they are not compatible with your new version.

I think you'll be well protected if you just make a backup copy of the subdirectory ~/.thunderbird (at least on my distro). I know the message databases are in daughter subdirectories of ~/.thunderbird, and I believe the accounts settings and other preferences are stashed down there, as well.

Tbird may be organized differently on your distro, but it shouldn't be dramatically different.

I've upgraded and downgraded Tbird several times and have never lost anything in the process, but I always make a message base backup first, just in case.

With TB 0.9, I got the tarball from Mozilla's website and unzipped the files straight into where I wanted it to go. I'm still fairly new to Linux so I'm not sure if these files that I unzipped are binaries. Are they binaries? I was under the inmpression that upon unzipping, those files create the entire program. I didn't need to compile or any of that stuff.

That directory contains the binaries (and other associated program files). So long as you haven't put any user data in that directory you can just remove it and replace it with the new version

I went ahead and upgraded by replacing the files that were already there. Everything went smooth and now I'm on TB 1.0. Thanks for your help!