Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

When setting up New email account can i download only x months of emails only?

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 71 views
  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

more options

Hi, I have 4 email accounts that i have had over 5 years and have a combined 20,000 plus emails.

I do not want to download all the emails when creating a new email account, and i do not want to delete them off the server as i would like to keep a record of them all if i need something in the future.

Please let me know the best way to deal with this. Ideally I would like to download just the emails for this year when creating my new email account in Thunderbird

Hi, I have 4 email accounts that i have had over 5 years and have a combined 20,000 plus emails. I do not want to download all the emails when creating a new email account, and i do not want to delete them off the server as i would like to keep a record of them all if i need something in the future. Please let me know the best way to deal with this. Ideally I would like to download just the emails for this year when creating my new email account in Thunderbird

Chosen solution

If you create a POP mail account: Pop will download whatever is in the server Inbox. So before creating the account, logon to webmail via a browser and move all those older emails out of the Inbox into another suitable folder, then Thunderbird will not download those moved emails and they will be stored on server.

If you create an IMAP mail account: You could choose to put older emails in a specific folder or Archive them which you do not subscribe to see. So emails are still on server, but you are not seeing that folder in Thunderbird. OR if you synchronise subscribed folders, you could choose to download only the recent xx days of emails. Note once these are downloaded, they remain until deleted, they are not replaced with most recent. But it should stop downloading loads of older emails. See info:

Read this answer in context 👍 3

All Replies (1)

more options

Chosen Solution

If you create a POP mail account: Pop will download whatever is in the server Inbox. So before creating the account, logon to webmail via a browser and move all those older emails out of the Inbox into another suitable folder, then Thunderbird will not download those moved emails and they will be stored on server.

If you create an IMAP mail account: You could choose to put older emails in a specific folder or Archive them which you do not subscribe to see. So emails are still on server, but you are not seeing that folder in Thunderbird. OR if you synchronise subscribed folders, you could choose to download only the recent xx days of emails. Note once these are downloaded, they remain until deleted, they are not replaced with most recent. But it should stop downloading loads of older emails. See info: