The fact that you have 14 returned is probably due to the fact that you return @msgs. If that is returned in scalar context then you get @msgs in scalar context, which tells you how many things are in @msgs.

Furthermore I suspect that you are seriously mangling your attempt to deal with references to arrays. It may be time to re-read references quick reference, and then replace your while loop with something like this:

    while ( my $thread = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() ){
        push @msgs, [$thread->{id}, 
                     $thread->{name}, 
                     $thread->{date},
                     $thread->{subj},
                     $thread->{day_rate},
                     $thread->{msg}];
    }
[download]

Though personally I would be inclined to keep an anonymous hash data structure like this:

    while ( my $thread = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() ){
        # I duplicate the data because DBI says that it may
        # choose to reuse the reference that it returns.
        push @msgs, { %$thread };
    }
[download]

(I would also indent differently, but that is cosmetic.)