Right click your account in the folder pane. Select settings If your account is POP; In Disk space set a limit over which mails will not be downloaded. If your account is IMAP; In Synchronization and storage set a limit on the size of messages to be downloaded.

Thanks Matt. I am still struggling to find my way around these support pages, but finally got here (obviously). My account is POP. Previously, no limit had been set. Attachments up to about 1 Mb were OK. I have now set it to 3Mb, and will have to wait for a new big attachment to see what happens.

What will happen is nothing for you to see, as such mail are simply skipped. But the large mail will remain on the serer and if your provider only allows a small space allowance they may accumulate and require deleting to keep your mail account running smoothly. (It will not be an issue with the likes of Google and their huge account storage's)

Just crashed (timed out?) on an email with two attachments, total less than 800kb. Unfortunately, these emails are not subsequently skipped at the server. Every time that I open thunderbird, it tries to open the troublesome email, then fails, and will not open anything further down the queue. Capacity at the provider is not the problem.

have you tried disabling email scanning in your anti virus?

Not yet. It is something I am reluctant to do, given the amount of harmful rubbish that comes through email these days, but I will try it the next time a big attachment turns up. Never used to be a problem, and I have not changed from Thunderbird or AVG Antivirus - except for the inevitable updates. Thanks for the continuing suggestions - I will let you know.

Hi Matt

It has been a while, as I have been trying a few things and waiting to see what happens. I now have my attachment download limit set at 10Mb, and this appears to cope with whatever has turned up in the past couple of weeks. Once again, thanks for your support and suggestions.

I have metered bb hotspot and don't want to download even 1mb needlessly let alone 10, but I don't want to miss a message because it is over the limit I set.

I think about setting account to download headers only, but that is a pain to always have to click the download thing and have to wait in that window until it is finished downloading or else download stops and you have to re-do.

Any chance there is a way to be able to download the message body and leave large attachments on the server? The attachments could be listed in the usual place at the bottom of email with menu to delete or download each.

I got my first over-limit email today and I am happy to say that it gave me a truncated body with message box saying "Click here to download the rest of the message", like "Download Headers Only" setting.

Unfortunately I didn't notice if it told me the size until I downloaded the rest of the message and attachments. duh

I am using Fedora 19 Linux > Thunderbird 31.3.0 .