Norton Antivirus and IMAP protocol

Good evening.
I use GMAIL in IMAP with Thunderbird as my mail client.
If I receive a phishing e-mail or one with a malicious attachment, am I still protected?
I cannot use POP3 for my mailbox management.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to increase this protocol as well, since it is, of course, very much in use?
Thank you all, Stefano - Italy

Norton only works with POP3, but for informational purposes, while Norton does not support integration with Thunderbird, you can get around this by leaving Norton AntiSpam enabled, so it will append "[Norton AntiSpam]" to the title of suspected spam messages, and creating a Message Rule in TB to move any such message with "[Norton AntiSpam]" in the subject line to the Junk Folder.

Norton will detect and block any known malware when you open an attachment and you can always save any suspicious attachment to your desktop, right-click it and run a Norton custom scan on it before opening.  The built-in Thunderbird spam filter is highly regarded and should do a very good job of catching spam messages that arrive in your inbox.

Hello Stefano. Thunderbird itself blocks scripts. Therefore it would be hard to contract a virus UNLESS, you physically opened an attachment to a message. 

https://support.mozilla.org/bm/questions/999433

Unfortunately, per the below article, Thunderbird does NOT support client integration with Norton anti-spam. 

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v1608238

SA