I just set up Thunderbird and synched it with by 3 email servers. When I removed old messages from my Thunderbird, gmail account - it also automatically removed these old messages from my gmail remote server as well. Many of these old messages were pictures and emails that I wanted to keep on the gmail remote server but wanted to clean them off my local Thunderbird gmail account. Everything I have read about sychronizing Thunderbird with gmail indicates that this should not have happened automatically - it says that I would have to manually remove them from Thunderbird and then manually remove them from the gmail server in order for them to be removed locally and from the server. These are important emails - is there a way to recover them? What can be done to avoid it from happening again? Larry