Sorry, is the message appearing in Firefox (your browser) or Thunderbird (email program)? I'm wondering because you're comparing it with using Gmail online.

it is thunderbird. I have a gmail address and use the thunderbird

What version of Thunderbird do you have?

sorry I'm not giving enough information. I use Thunderbird 31.6.0 and was just updated to 31.7.0.

Thunderbird goes to my gmail.com account and puts my email into itself. I see a note fairly frequently on left hand corner saying something to effect of downloading 00 of 000. emails

The issue here is, has a full synchronization actually occurred, or is it still occurring... Or is Thunderbird re downloading all your emails over and over.

Then their is the question is either of those things what you want anyway?

So.... right click the gmail account in the folder tree and select settings. In composition and Addressing deselect "keep messages for this account on This computer". This will cause only the information used to build the mail summary lists to be downloaded. The rest will only be downloaded when you click on a mail to view it. This is the most bandwidth miserly setting.

Right click the Gmail account again and this time select subscribe. Deselect All mail and any other folders you don't actually want to see. Important is one I deselect as they are in the inbox anyway. This will further reduce the downloads and the duplicates in All mail will not be downloaded, nor will the unsubscribed folders.

hairlygene said

I have limited data wifi. I have unusually large data use and can't pinpoint the cause. I note that I keep seeing on the bottom line of firefox something like: "loading 500 of 5678 emails." However, I don't, of course have that many emails saved. Could this be a cause of excess the data useage?

Thank you very very much.