I had prepared acct by reducing Gmail Inbox to just 18- msgs of past 2 days.

Keeping the Inbox as clean as possible is best practice.

(1) Instead of just downloading the 180 msgs from Gmail Inbox, Tbird seems to be taking msgs from archives (10s of 1000s)

I'm not sure what you expected is being downloaded. When you set up your account as IMAP everything on the server will be downloaded. You can control that by unsubscribing from the folders you don't need.

we have been doing shifts, repeatedly clicking "Get messages" to receive another dollop.

It isn't necessary to do that. Downloading a large number of messages can take a while though.

(3) MSgs seem to be received in random order

In Thunderbird you can sort messages to your liking. View (Alt-V) - Sort by

Setup as POP, not IMAP. We want to control when msgs get deleted etc.

Is there no way to tell Tbird to take msgs only from Gmail's Inbox, not archives?

Why does it download just chunks at a time? Is there any way to start downloading all the messages?

Thx

Pop only connects to the Inbox. Are you sure it is set to pop? What about the gmail All Mail folder. When was the last time you did cleanup there?

Setup as POP, not IMAP.

Please post your Troubleshooting Information. At the top right of the Thunderbird window, click the menu button , then select Help > Troubleshooting Information. Press the Copy text to clipboard button and paste the information into your reply.

Is there no way to tell Tbird to take msgs only from Gmail's Inbox, not archives?

If this account was a POP account you wouldn't download Archives in the first place.

Why does it download just chunks at a time?

My best guess is that anti-virus software is interfering with the download.

.. Just to be clear ... Gmail server msgs were prepped by deleting everything except 2015. Everything prior to 2015/12/31 was untagged as Inbox, which according to Gmail designates these msgs as "Archives". Certainly we expected to download only the ~180 msgs in Gmail Inbox and had no intention to download archival msgs.

Biggest problem has been Tbird's limitation of downloading only 400-800 msgs at a time for what seems to total about 50K msgs (about 180 wanted and the rest unwanted).

Once it was clear that Tbird was going to take everything from the Gmail server, it would have been desirable to let it start downloading them all continuously. However, having to download them by several hundred at a time was like trying to empty a lake with a small bucket. It has been a tedious process taking 2 of us many hours.

Sometimes I go on a trip and return to have several thousand messages accumulated. Does Tbird not have the capability to download this volume of Emails in a single operation?

Hope the problem is not due to some conflict between Tbird and my anti-virus software. I have never encountered this problem with previous Email software (Eudora), while running the same anti-virus software.

Thx ..

We can stop here if you don't answer the questions.

Sorry, thought I had answered all questions.

Tbird setup is definitely set to POP for this account.

All Mail folder has been "cleaned" as described above, to eliminate msgs older that 2015/01/01. Critical issue was Inbox, and that has been "cleaned" to de-tag all msgs prior to 2015/12/31. According to Gmail, they remain in All Mail category as Archives, not Inbox.

In any case, all those msgs gave now been downloaded by Tbird and I'm now receiving new msgs from Gmail Inbox, which is OK. (There's a new issue, but I'll post that in a separate thread.)

My continuing concern is that future downloads of large volumes (1000s) of msgs will invoke the same problem of intermittent downloads of chunks rather than a smooth continuous download of all files.

Sorry, thought I had answered all questions.

Which part of 'Please post your Troubleshooting Information.' didn't you understand? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1102265#answer-825733

(1) "Please post your Troubleshooting information" was not a question.

(2) Here's the material from following those instructions.

 Application Basics

   Name: Thunderbird
   Version: 38.5.0
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.5.0
   Profile Folder: Show Folder

             (Local drive)
   Application Build ID: 20151221142744
   Enabled Plugins: about:plugins
   Build Configuration: about:buildconfig
   Memory Use: about:memory

 Mail and News Accounts
   account1:
     INCOMING: account1, , (pop3) pop.gmail.com:995, SSL, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: smtp.gmail.com:465, SSL, OAuth2, true

   account2:
     INCOMING: account2, , (none) Local Folders, plain, passwordCleartext

 Crash Reports

 Extensions
   Lightning, 4.0.5, true, {e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}

 Important Modified Preferences

   Name: Value

     accessibility.typeaheadfind.flashBar: 0
     browser.cache.disk.capacity: 358400
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value: 358400
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run: false
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.use_old_max: false
     extensions.lastAppVersion: 38.5.0
     font.name.monospace.el: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-cyrillic: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-unicode: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-western: Consolas
     font.name.sans-serif.el: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-cyrillic: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-unicode: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-western: Calibri
     font.name.serif.el: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-cyrillic: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-unicode: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-western: Cambria
     font.size.fixed.el: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-cyrillic: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-unicode: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-western: 14
     font.size.variable.el: 17
     font.size.variable.x-cyrillic: 17
     font.size.variable.x-unicode: 17
     font.size.variable.x-western: 17
     mail.openMessageBehavior.version: 1
     mail.winsearch.firstRunDone: true
     mailnews.database.global.datastore.id: 6121c5c0-d5ee-455d-89a0-baa32d3483e
     network.cookie.prefsMigrated: true
     network.predictor.cleaned-up: true
     places.database.lastMaintenance: 1451656128
     places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages: 104858
     plugin.importedState: true

 Graphics

     Adapter Description: Intel(R) HD Graphics
     Vendor ID: 0x8086
     Device ID: 0x0042
     Adapter RAM: Unknown
     Adapter Drivers: igdumd64 igd10umd64 igdumdx32 igd10umd32
     Driver Version: 8.15.10.2622
     Driver Date: 1-10-2012
     Direct2D Enabled: false
     DirectWrite Enabled: false (6.2.9200.17292)
     ClearType Parameters: ClearType parameters not found
     WebGL Renderer: false
     GPU Accelerated Windows: 0

     AzureCanvasBackend: skia
     AzureSkiaAccelerated: 0
     AzureFallbackCanvasBackend: cairo
     AzureContentBackend: cairo

 JavaScript

 Incremental GC: 1

 Accessibility

   Activated: 0
   Prevent Accessibility: 0

 Library Versions

     Expected minimum version
     Version in use

     NSPR
     4.10.10
     4.10.10

     NSS
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC

     NSS Util
     3.19.2.1
     3.19.2.1

     NSS SSL
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC

     NSS S/MIME
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC
     3.19.2.1 Basic ECC

Everything prior to 2015/12/31 was untagged as Inbox, which according to Gmail designates these msgs as "Archives".

I tend to agree but I'm not sure what exactly you did. Do you still see all those messages in Inbox when logging in via webmail?

It is my understanding that with a POP account only Inbox is visible to Thunderbird. This may not be exactly true for Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/34030?hl=en&ref_topic=3397961

My continuing concern is that future downloads of large volumes (1000s) of msgs will invoke the same problem of intermittent downloads of chunks rather than a smooth continuous download of all files.

Sounds like this is expected, see above link. You don't need to press 'Get Mail' though.

As said before, anti-virus software may also play a role since it takes time to scan a large mail file every time it gets written to disk. It is therefore recommended to create an exception for the Thunderbird profile folder in your anti-virus software. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird