I have used Thuderbird with Gmail for several years now. And until just recently the messages in my local Gmail trash folder never got deleted automatically once they were over 30 days old. They just stayed in my local trash folder and I would have to manually delete them as they piled up. Then about a month or two ago they started getting deleted once they were 30 days old. Now I am aware that Gmail deletes any messages in Trash over 30 days old. And I know the easy way to stop that from happening is to move them to another folder before the 30 days has elapsed. I have had to start archiving messages to make sure I have old ones that I might need. But I want to know why they started getting deleted automatically at some point. And also if there is a way to set Thunderbird to stop deleting the messages from my local Trash folder. Why? You ask? Because previously when I could just delete mail. Even things that at first glance I thought I would never need again but might become important. But now I have to take time to figure out whether that email might be needed in the future for any reason at all.