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How to I keep all my email on my local machine and nothing in gmail.

redcrown.arkacy
redcrown.arkacy
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I have 2 gmail accounts. I want to keep all my email on my local machine and nothing on the gmail cloud. So after I receive and read an email I want it to remain in my Thunderbird Inbox but disappear from gmail. Likewise, when I move an email from my Thunderbird Inbox to a Local Folder, I don't want it saved anywhere in the gmail cloud.

I thought I had Thunderbird configed to do that, but I recently discovered tons of emails still in the gmail system. Strangely, gmail still holds many of my emails but not all. I can't see the rhyme or reason why some are gone and some are not.

So please tell me how or point me to a tutorial to make this happen... and how to clean out all the emails still in the gmail cloud. In otherwords, I want to completely break the sync between Thunderbird and gmail.

I have 2 gmail accounts. I want to keep all my email on my local machine and nothing on the gmail cloud. So after I receive and read an email I want it to remain in my Thunderbird Inbox but disappear from gmail. Likewise, when I move an email from my Thunderbird Inbox to a Local Folder, I don't want it saved anywhere in the gmail cloud. I thought I had Thunderbird configed to do that, but I recently discovered tons of emails still in the gmail system. Strangely, gmail still holds many of my emails but not all. I can't see the rhyme or reason why some are gone and some are not. So please tell me how or point me to a tutorial to make this happen... and how to clean out all the emails still in the gmail cloud. In otherwords, I want to completely break the sync between Thunderbird and gmail.

All Replies (2)

Matt
Matt
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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First. Do Not use IMAP for your purpose. It just will get you going in circles.

Second Then pop over to your gmail settings here https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/fwdandpop Ensure POP is enabled and the gmail action when mail is accessed is to actually delete it.

Create a pop mail account in Thunderbird and ensure that the account settings in Thunderbird are set to delete mail on the server upon download.

That will do it going forward, and if you set pop in gmail to all mail, it will duplicate the already downloaded, but it will also remover the mail.

redcrown.arkacy
redcrown.arkacy Question owner
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Thanks a lot. I think I've got that figured out now. Using POP and disabling IMAP, new traffic is no longer being saved in Gmail after I move messages to Local folders.

However, I've still got 600+ old messages still in Gmail. If I delete one of those in Gmail, the copy in Tbird also disappears. Don't want that, of course. Any idea how to clean out Gmail but leave everything in Tbird?

When I enabled POP in Gmail, there were 2 options. One is "for all mail" and one is for "mail that arrives from now own". I set "for all mail" hoping that would apply to all old mail as well. Apparently not.