Force download of all emails from gmail server

The prefix you are looking for is "recent:"

1. Check/Enable POP for all mail in Gmail (Web Browser)

• Log into your Gmail account via a web browser and go to Settings > See all settings.
• Click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
• In the "POP download" section, select: 1. Status: Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded).
• Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

2. Check/Update Thunderbird Settings

• Open Thunderbird and go to Account Settings.
• Under your Gmail account, click on Server Settings.
• In the User Name field, add the recent: prefix before your email address.
• Example recent:yourusername@gmail.com
• Click OK and then click Get Messages.

See more info Google Support Article.

Thank you for this! I had forgotten the first steps that needed to be done to gmail. Does the "recent:" not restrict it to just the last month?

I got more to come down by removing the "recent:", but still not all the mail, but then I noticed in the gmail browser that it says "We are working on processing your previous POP update. You will be able to edit POP again when this finishes." so maybe I tried the download to soon? I need to wait until gmail does its thing?

Thanks again for your quick response this morning!

Yeah, it doesn't appear to be working. I had set gmail back to "Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on" a couple of hours ago and then reset it to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" and waited until it was complete. It now says "Status: POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since 12/31/69". Thunderbird happened to still have the restart prefix so I removed it which forced the restart. It then downloaded 273 emails out of a total of 2,369.

There must be an "all" prefix of some sort that will force it to bring everything down?

If it's POP3, your emails on the server side will be deleted automatically after you download them to your local folder. Am I right?

If you delete emails in your local folder, they are gone - maybe you can find them in your local trash folder.

No, thankfully I have Thunderbird set to not delete emails from the server. I do that clean up manually from time to time. Unfortunately, I can't yet get them to download.

Okay, not sure why but gradually over night it appears to have brought the emails down, as best as I can tell. Not sure why I couldn't get it to just pull down all 2,700 at once but it appears to have brought them down in smaller groups... for some reason.

Thank you for all the help with this. Wouldn't have figured it out otherwise!