Here are my tips, but I'm no expert on archiving. - The archive feature allows you to specify one archive, annual archive, or monthly archive. Pick what fits your schedule. I suggest yearly at minimum. - archiving is a manual process, so you would need to periodically select messages and click 'archive' and the messages would be placed into the archive defined, whether annual or monthly. This, over time, will break your message folder into a smaller size and you can browse old messages as desired. - TB's archiving is good for ongoing archiving, but with 20gig to start, I suggest creating a number of local folders and manually selecting and moving messages to each, to reduce the immediate folder sizes. - however, for backup, I encourage setting up an external approach, such as IDRIVE or other services that daily archive folders in case of a PC crash or other outage.

Your problems with Gmail are, in my opinion, a different issue. I am assuming you are having trouble with the Oauth authentication. If so... Here are the basics:

- change your security authorization to Oauth2 (do this for the incoming server settings and also for the Outgoing (SMTP) server - two places - remove the password entries for the account (remove the entire entries both incoming and outgoing) - that password info is at Tools>Preferences>Privacy&Security - click 'saved passwords' Then click 'show passwords' then highlight the rows with incoming and outgoing gmail servers and click DELete. - check to ensure that TB is set to accept cookies (that setting is just above the Passwords section) - Google will then step you through the authentication process for your PC.

Before doing any of this, I encourage making a backup of the profile folder to prevent any outage. And maybe someone with more extensive archiving expertise will chime in here.

Hey David! Thanks so much for the quick reply. I let you know how things work out when I have a bit of time to play with the settings, etc.

Still don't really understand the benefit of archiving, if it "free's up" the application while it's running, if you can still read/access archived emails and read/access backed up emails and what the difference really is between backing up and archiving?

Looks like good info on the Google issue. I was basically using Google as a "backup" of my email but see it hasn't been doing that for a while. The good news is I do currently have all of my email on my laptop and it's all accessible which is why I'm looking at backing up/Archiving, uninstalling and then starting fresh.

Thanks again and I'll update when I get to that!

The difference between archiving and backing up likely varies with individuals. To me, archiving is filing messages that aren't actively needed in a place where they can be readily retrieved. Backing up is how I define the process of protecting the messages from being lost. I regularly see posts here by users who, for a variety of reasons, have lost years of messages.

Hey David ~ Agreed. Precisely what I'd like to avoid. One of the main things I have an issue with is after I "back up" my email, the only way I've found to read any of those emails again is to "re-install" all the folders back into the application?

I have a LOT of messages and folders that I certainly don't need constant or even very rare access to. I'd say 90% of my total email at least is rarely touched.

I haven't done enough actual "archiving" or playing with the program regarding backing up or archiving to ask any more meaningful questions at this point so, again, certainly appreciate your quick response and look forward to becoming a backup/archive master! ;-)

Well, some ideas to ponder for you.... - you could set archive folder to a different drive and would simplify having that 90% easily backed up. - you could periodically copy your entire profile (which would be everything EXCEPT that other drive). That is probably located at c:\users\yourID\appdata\roaming\thunderbird which would allow easy restore if PC (or Thunderbird) crashes, and only minor adjustment of restoring to a different PC. I'll leave you with that to consider. Once done, just periodically copy the profile and extra drive contents.

re :I have a LOT of messages and folders that I certainly don't need constant or even very rare access to. I'd say 90% of my total email at least is rarely touched.

If using imap account, you could put old emails into folders with good identifiable names for organising and then choose to 'unsubscribe' from seeing them. They are still on server, but not cluttering up your account. To see them - subscribe to see the desired folder.

Thanks again David! And again, I need to play with these features a bit before I can really understand what you're saying.

One of the other issues I have is that since I've copied this profile and other folders from computer to computer over the years, I have a few different actual storage folders on my computer other than the Profile folder where my email is. I have a "Thunderbird Profile Folder" under my C: drive which is only about 600 mb, a "Thunderbird Current Windows 7 NEW" folder under C: drive which is the big one, almost 20 GB, and my actual Profile folder is exactly where you said it would be and is about 800 mb. I also have a c:\Thunderbird Import Test folder that's about 36k which I think I used just to see if things were working the way they were supposed to 6 years ago or so.

So yep, I have some cleaning up to do once I can figure out what's actually in use, what Thunderbird needs and the simplest, cleanest way to do that ~ thanks again!

Hey Toad-Hall! Thanks for the reply! I'm currently POP3. I'm old school. . .this is going back to the days when I used to copy my entire email folder to my laptop when i'd go out of town and copy back to desktop computer when I returned! I'm not opposed to switching to IMAP but I have to say I like the idea of having all of my email saved locally just in case.

Also, I'm using an Optimum email account right now, which used to be really easy to download all of your old email for backup but a recent "improvement" on the web interface makes this no longer possible. And since I found out that my "Google Backup" idea (I had Google fetching all of my Optimum email as well and I rarely checked Google) hasn't been working, my local email storage is pretty much all that I have at the moment and I'm at my limit on Optimum at 5 GB stored on their servers.

So, yeah, I definitely have some things to clean up, backup, archive, etc. and looking forward to really understanding how this works and getting it setup right from a fresh start!