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Setting up Thunderbird

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  • Last reply by duggabe

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Hello every one. i am planing on switching to Thunderbird from windows mail (vista version) but before that i would like to know is there a setting in Tb to download emails only from the day that i set it up and not to download all the emails from past eight or nine years that are on the servers, i have six different mail accounts with with more than 20,000 mails in some of them and 50,000 in one of my primary account which i don't want thunder bird to download, i only want mails from date i set it up. is there a setting in Tb for doing that ?

Hello every one. i am planing on switching to Thunderbird from windows mail (vista version) but before that i would like to know is there a setting in Tb to download emails only from the day that i set it up and not to download all the emails from past eight or nine years that are on the servers, i have six different mail accounts with with more than 20,000 mails in some of them and 50,000 in one of my primary account which i don't want thunder bird to download, i only want mails from date i set it up. is there a setting in Tb for doing that ?

All Replies (3)

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Since you say the messages are on the servers, I assume you are using IMAP. Go to Account Settings -> Synchronization and Storage and select 'Synchronize the most recent ...' and set it to a small number of days. That should keep it from downloading all the older stuff.

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duggabe said

Since you say the messages are on the servers, I assume you are using IMAP. Go to Account Settings -> Synchronization and Storage and select 'Synchronize the most recent ...' and set it to a small number of days. That should keep it from downloading all the older stuff.

hi buggable, no i am using pop3 with leave a copy on the server settings. will the suggestion you gave work ? i could switch to IMAP in thunderbird i if that setting will help. thanks for the reply.

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It should work for POP as well, but you might consider an alternative: export your mail to a separate storage area and delete it from the active folders: local as well as on the server.

There is an add-on to TB which allows import and export of emails in various formats to a separate storage medium (external disk, thumb drive, etc.).

The instructions on how to download and install it can be found at http://barryduggan.info/exportMail.php