1. Open Thunderbird, press Alt or F10 to see the menu bar, click on Tools menu, then Account Settings
2. At left select the account.
3. Click on Synchronization & Storage in the Disk Space session you can set some preferences to download messages only from the x days

So i tired to do this but for some reason this email account doesn't have Synchronization & Storage, it does have Disk Space but it doesn't have the options like the other ones do. This just says for email size and when to delete the messages.

Sounds like you have a POP mail account.

For new exisitng mail account - Pop mail accounts access and download whatever is on the server Inbox and thereafter only download what has not already been downloaded.

So, if you only want it to download say everything from first of July this year: Logon to webmail account using a browser. Move all emails that do not have a July date into another folder. Then the pop mail account cannot see them, so cannot download them.

Once all older mail is removed from Inbox on server, use Get Messages to download the remainder.

Well I gave this a try and it must still be able to see the folder because once again it tried to download ALL the emails. Is there a setting or something I need to change?

re :Well I gave this a try and it must still be able to see the folder because once again it tried to download ALL the emails.

Pop mail accounts only see server Inbox - so it can only download whatever is in webmail Inbox. Log back onto webmail and see what is in the Inbox. Inbox on server should not have subfolders. So you would have needed to create a new folder to store all those older mails, so Inbox was virtually empty.

Please confirm the type of mail account you're using. Right click on mail account name and select 'Settings' click on 'Server Settings' for the mail account At the top it will say 'Server Type:' does it say POP or IMAP ?

Server Type says Pop. I also did as you said and emptied the inbox by putting everything into another folder but it still tries to download everything. Maybe this account wont work with Thunderbird?

Note also that unless you have set it to leave copies on the server, those messages may now be in Thunderbird and no longer on the server. Be careful what you delete.

Most POP servers, historically, offer only limited storage space, and they don't anticipate you leaving a lot of material there. This all changed with IMAP, where the server becomes the primary store of all your messages, and so the storage allocation tends to be greater too.

Google has a "recent" feature because whilst they promote IMAP and equivalents and so provide comparatively generous storage, they also offer POP and recognize the very problem you are having. See if your email provider has any similar mechanism.