I have been using Outlook for my email accounts, including Gmail, but would like to install Thunderbird as Gmail soon will no longer work with my version of Outlook. In the Mozilla support article "How to add your Gmail account to Thunderbird", it says that after configuring the account, "Thunderbird will download your existing messages and your Gmail will be ready to use." Will Thunderbird at that stage download every message in Gmail's inbox? My problem is that I have thousands of old messages in Gmail as have never accessed Gmail from my browser but from my email programs (Outlook Express, Win Liive Mail, Outlook) where I store messages in folders and delete whatever is not needed. If Thunderbird is, by default, going to download everything in Gmail, are there any options to limit this by date or any other criteria. Thank you for any help. Scotch