How can I filter webmail emails?

If you use Thunderbird with an email service that provides lots of storage space such as Google Mail, you may not want to download every email from the account.

Doing so can quickly use a huge amount of disk space or use a lot of data if you are using a mobile broadband dongle.

To filter which emails you want to download, click on the Tools menu and then Account Settings. Click on Synchronization & Storage in the left-hand column.

Make sure the option ‘Keep messages for this account on this computer’ is selected and then click on the Advanced button. Click on the arrow to the left of your address to reveal all the folders for the account (this means labels for Google Mail accounts).

Click in the boxes to remove the arrows for any folders that you don’t want downloaded. Click on OK in this and the next window when you are happy with the results.

If you have already downloaded the emails and turned off the folder synchronisation, it is possible to tell Thunderbird to remove the superfluous files. Click on the File menu and then Compact Folders. This may take some time but will happen in the background so you can read and write emails in the meantime.

Richard Saunders

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