Heal my flightless Thunderbird

June 9, 2009 11:16 AM

I just installed Thunderbird and added my gmail account. Thunderbird only wants to "get" about 100 emails at a time. I have many thousands of emails. Is there any way to make Thunderbird get all of my emails in one go? I don't want to sit here pressing "get mail" indefinitely.

Additional pipe dream: is there any way to "get" my chats?

posted by prefpara to computers & internet (6 comments total)

This is a gmail limitation. Set your get new mail interval to 120 seconds and you'll get them down in a while.
posted by Mitheral at 11:18 AM on June 9

Hmm? Are you not using IMAP?
posted by serak at 12:29 PM on June 9

I believe I am using POP. I did not see IMAP as an option.
posted by prefpara at 12:37 PM on June 9

Just use IMAP. Thunderbird handles it just fine.
posted by zsazsa at 1:29 PM on June 9

Unless you actually have a reason to download the emails, that is-- IMAP does not store copies of the mail locally on your machine. If you do want this, then do as Mitheral suggested. Nowadays since most people have always-on broadband, though, IMAP is perfectly fine.
posted by ckolderup at 1:40 PM on June 9

Accessing your chat logs through IMAP doesn't seem possible, though, as if you look at the "Labels" page in Gmail's settings you can choose whether or not you want particular labels to show up as folders in IMAP and "Chats" is greyed out.
posted by ckolderup at 1:43 PM on June 9