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How can I limit how many emails I download?

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by fvp

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I'm accessing an email account using POP and want to take the emails off the server into my Thunderbird client. However there's a lot of email on the server, nearly 20k. I'd like to specify how many to retrieve at each session, like get the next 5k and stop. Is there an option to do this and how? Thank You

I'm accessing an email account using POP and want to take the emails off the server into my Thunderbird client. However there's a lot of email on the server, nearly 20k. I'd like to specify how many to retrieve at each session, like get the next 5k and stop. Is there an option to do this and how? Thank You

All Replies (4)

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Open the account in webmail, create a subfolder, and move all but 5k of the Inbox there. Since POP only reads the Inbox, TB will download the 5k that are there. Then, move another 5k to Inbox from the subfolder and download with TB.

If this is a gmail account, the Takeout option allows downloading mail folders as one mbox file, which can be imported to TB.

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A novel idea, I wish the webmail of this account was so flexible, it only allows me to view a few email at a time, like a couple screens and any actions performed only work on those visible, so moving large quantity of emails is very cumbersome.

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fvp said

A novel idea, I wish the webmail of this account was so flexible, it only allows me to view a few email at a time, like a couple screens and any actions performed only work on those visible, so moving large quantity of emails is very cumbersome.

Then I guess the answer is you just have to let them all download.

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Already done, it just took a while and one crash, not sure why... I was hoping there were more features in Thunderbird that allow that. For example, I can't even stop a download of email nicely, once it starts. I wish they had a STOP button, so then I could have started the downloads and stopped it at a set #. But the stop option would need to finish up processing all the emails it downloaded including removing them from the mail server. Thanks for the suggestion.