Hi Petra, the matter is, that in your old settings you had checked the "leave mails on server" setting (or maybe you used IMAP as mail protocol). This means, that all your mail since 2007 is still held on the server and TB consideres them as "new" and starts to download them. So you have to close thunderbird or kill the process via task manager (ctrl Alt Del==>taskmanager). Then you could log on to the webmailer of your provider and delete all mails you don't want to keep any longer. If you're on job, you should ask your admin to help you to configure the mail settings. If this is your private computer and you can't access your mailbox via webmail, then ask again, I'll try to help you further. regards georg