I have just recently started to use Thunderbird and have set it up to use my long held Gmail account. It is all set up and everything appears to be working correctly. My understanding is that when I first double clicked on the the computers icon in the bottom left of the app and choose the "download now" option from the resulting dialogue box is that it would have download all emails from gmails servers onto my computer. Then each time I do this it will keep my computer in sync with the gmail server. However I understand that it only downloads the headers of the emails and therefore if my Gmail account got hacked and sabotaged or something else happened where I lost access to my Gmail account I would not be able to view the bodies of the emails in Thunderbird. Is this correct and if so can Thunderbird be configured so that I receive the bodies and attachments when downloading to my computer. It would be nice to achieve a full back up of my Gmail account in Thunderbird. I have already successfully backed up my contacts using gcontactsync.

Any help much appreciated and thank you.