How to get Thunderbird not to re-download all the emails after server move

emailimappop3thunderbird

I've moved over all emails from 10 accounts on one server to another. I use IMAP so this won't be an issue for myself, but someone else using these email accounts uses pop3.
When I change the settings on their computer, Thunderbird will (I assume) download all the messages of the server, even though they are on their computer already.

Is there a way to force Thunderbird to only download emails from (for example) today as well as leaving messages on the server? We already have the "leave messages on the server" checked, but we don't want to download 10,000+ emails that were sent before today.

Best Answer

The file \Data\profile\Mail\pop.[mailserver].[domain]\popstate.dat file is what keeps track of which emails have already been downloaded from the POP server.

An example on my Windows XP Home PC is:

C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\qn5qd3de.default\Mail\pop.att.yahoo.com\popstate.dat

# POP3 State File
# This is a generated file!  Do not edit.

*pop.att.yahoo.com AWehmann
k AHfVimIAAFFZTwJOOAAQHz0XYU8 1325822549
k ALnPjkQAARslTk0SJwOBFFSXUwk 1313674828
k ALbPjkQAADijSiRISQK9whTL178 1243891806
k AK/VimIAAXI5TwSSMQM8WDKNut0 1325822555
k ALDVimIAASYOTuZNwgVwMgSXZN4 1323792415
k AN7VimIAAM1uT0ZHUA1JGhbBzms 1330020393
b AODVimIAAQzKTuDXaAISoH6BC8M 1323402949

There are more entries, but I don't show all of them.

The column #2 has email IDs, column #3 has the email dates in unixtime format (use a tool to convert to human-readable or back).
By deleting appropriate lines you can make Thunderbird re-download those emails.
In your case, as Thunderbird has the IDs already, it should not re-download these emails.

In the case of Gmail things are somewhat different. With default settings the Gmail POP server only offers newly arrived emails. If there are none, then the popstate.dat file is emptied out, since the server reports that there are no emails available for download from the server.

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