My wife has accumulated over 40,000 messages in one of her Earthlink email accounts over ten years or so, filling her allotted server space. I downloaded Thunderbird v.102.1.1 to her computer and configured it to use POP3 with "leave messages on server" checked and "For at most" checked and set to 365 days, with "Until I delete them" left unchecked. I downloaded all the messages, expecting most of them to be deleted from the server, but none were. The server is still full. Compacting the Thunderbird inbox doesn't help, nor do repeated clicks on "Get Messages." It would be nice if the ambiguous wording of the server settings were clarified. I have these questions: 1. Does "For at most" for a POP3 account mean that today's date is being compared with the creation date of the message or to the date on which it was first downloaded to Thunderbird? If the latter, how can I make it behave like the former? My wife can't wait a year to delete messages from her server inbox, but she doesn't want to lose the recent messages there because she is used to using Webmail to access them. Earthlink only allows 50 messages to be deleted at a time, so it would be tedious to use Webmail to delete the downloaded messages there hundreds of times. 2. Does "Until I delete them" for a POP3 account mean delete them directly from the server using Webmail, delete them from the Thunderbird inbox, move them to a local folder in Thunderbird, and/or something else this might mean? If the "For at most" box is checked, does "Until" mean "Unless I delete them first"? 3. Any suggestions of how I can trigger Thunderbird to send its DELE messages to the server would be appreciated. Perhaps I'm missing something. Thanks.