How to stop gmail from resending old deleted Thunderbird messages?
I have Thunderbird synching with my Gmail account using POP. My Thunderbird Inbox is huge so I deleted thousands of very old messages. Next time I started Thunderbird it downloaded all those messages again. How can I leave the old messages in Gmail, keep downloading new Gmail messages, but not the old ones if I delete them from Thunderbird again?
All Replies (3)
There might be some corruption on that folder or with the popstate.dat file. suggest you start by seeing if this is an error with the Inbox. Create some folders to use for organisation and storage, so the Inbox is actually used as an Inbox for new and unread mail and mail waiting to be sorted in folders. Move good wanted emails into suitably named folders. Delete unwanted emails from Inbox When Inbox is empty: Right click on Inbox and select 'compact'
Report back on results.
Thanks for the suggestion. The old messages are already in a Local Folder. I deleted 20,000 from the Inbox and All Mail folders and compacted both. They did not return to the Inbox but were re-loaded into All Mail. I did not empty the inbox or All Mail folders - do I need to?
Other idea?
I deleted 20,000 from the Inbox and All Mail folders and compacted both. They did not return to the Inbox but were re-loaded into All Mail. Sorry but slightly confused by this statement. How can you compact the 'All Mail folder'? Pop accounts do not have access to the 'All Mail' folder. There is no 'All Mail' folder in a Pop mail account. So it cannot be emptied nor compacted within a POP mail account in Thunderbird.
Deleting any emails from a gmail POP Inbox account in Thunderbird, will put them into the Pop Trash folder which you can then empty. Compacting the Inbox will then properly delete the emails from that folder. This cleans up what you have on your computer.
If you have settings in Pop account set to delete off server when you delete emails in Pop account, then after compacting the gmail pop Inbox, this will have the effect of deleting the Inbox label from those emails held on the gmail server, so if you then logged onto webmail account, the emails should have gone from the webmail Inbox. However, because pop accounts do not have any access to the server Trash folder, this means the emails did not get put into the server Trash folder. Gmail only deletes emails off server if they have been put into the server Trash folder. Pop accounts cannot achieve this. This means gmail archived them because you removed the label. So, they will be in the 'All Mail' folder.
Did you logon to your gmail webmail account via a browser? If yes, then you should be able to see the contents of the 'All Mail' folder. If you really want to delete them off the server, log on to webmail account, then delete the emails from the 'All Mail' folder.