On 03-05-2008 23:35 CET, windwatcher composed this enchanting statement:
> I have installed Thunderbird 2.0 with Lightening and got my Outlook
> mail transferred via Outlook Express. I finally I got it to get mail
> from my gmail account, but it downloaded about 2700 messages with
> wrong dates and times, They are all in a gmail address inbox, and
> then under Local Folders there is an Outlook Express folder with all
> the subfolders that I have mail sorted into.
>
> This is a real big mess, and I don't know how to sort it out. I can
> zap all those 2700 messages, but will it download everything in that
> gmail account whenever I ask for mail? I configured this gmail as an
> IMAP account. Would POP3 work better?
>
> I'd very much like to use this email client and get rid of Outlook,
> which has more features than I need. Thanks for your help.
>

Gmail, collecting and harvesting all your mail messages, does match with
an IMAP account on the mail client, Thunderbird. That means, all your
mail messages are kept (and scanned for advertizing purposes) by Google.
In principle you would not want to store any of them in your local
storage, but only the message index with is not large really, only 2700.

Of course you can download whole messages, possibly filter it and stored
it locally. Once, in sync with the message base on Google you do the
same automatically on (new) incoming messages on the Inbox.

Hope this helps to handle you Gmail locally.

--
Kind regards,
Melchert

(MacOS 10.3.9 / Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird 2.0)