The answer will depend on if you are using POP or IMAP.

If you are using POP

Right-click your account in the normal folder view of Thunderbird and choose Settings.

Choose Server Settings on the left side for your e-mail account.

You will see a window showing options like my first screenshot below. Un-check the setting I have circled, which is "Leave messages on server".

If you are using IMAP

Either just move the messages out of the Inbox for the e-mail account, to a folder under "Local Folders", or set up a message filter to do this automatically for you.

1. Create a folder in "Local Folders" called "Inbox".

2. Using the menu bar, select Tools: Message Filters. Or using the "three bar" menu button on the top right, select Message Filters: Message Filters.

3. In the top left of the Message Filters window, change the Filters for option to the e-mail account you want.

4. Click on the New button on the top right to start creating a new filter.

5. Name the filter. In the match section, choose Match all messages. In the Perform these actions section, choose Move Message to and then select the Inbox in Local Folders. Click OK to save the filter.

That takes care of incoming messages. Now to deal with other types of messages.

6. Right-click your account in the normal folder view of Thunderbird and choose Settings.

7. Select Copies & Folders on the left side for the account.

8. On the right side, change the options for each type of message so then it will be saved in the appropriate folder in Local Folders. See my second screenshot below as a guide.

Bruce,

Your reply is very helpful. I have three related questions, but they will require covering a little history. I had been using TB with an e-mail account on Time Warner Cable for a number of years, when, about 1 1/2 years ago, my rather old Windows computer became unusable. I set up TB on a newer computer with a newer version of Windows and resumed use of the same e-mail account. I noticed that I no longer had certain settings options that I had previously had. Most notably, the "Leave messages on server" setting no longer existed, so I could not turn that off and resume using TB the way I had before. TB had set me up with IMAP access to the account rather than POP.

As your reply seems to indicate, POP is friendlier to those of us who expect _no_ new e-mail messages to stay on the mail server once we've downloaded them. My questions:

1. It looks like I might be better off changing my TB settings so that TB will use POP access to my Time Warner Cable account rather than IMAP. Should I be able to use POP again on my Time Warner Cable account?

2. Will I run into problems with my current mailboxes--Inbox, many sub-mailboxes under Inbox, Drafts, Sent, a couple of sub-mailboxes under Sent, Trash, .ERROR, Junkmail, SentMail--if I create a POP set-up to the same e-mail account and then remove the IMAP set-up I'm currently using?

3. I believe IMAP is a newer e-mail server protocol than POP. If I switch TB to using POP with my Time Warner Cable account, would I be giving up something important that I currently have with IMAP?

Thanks a bunch for your assistance.

Answers to your questions:

1. Theoretically, yes, but there will probably be problems. I don't recommend that Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter Communications customers use POP for their Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter e-mail addresses. They use Yahoo for their e-mail, and Yahoo has had problems this year keeping POP working properly. Given the lack of useful responses by Yahoo to the issue, my opinion is that they are trying to get people to stop using POP, by making it difficult to do so. It may still be possible to use POP, but it seems to be hit-or-miss, from customer to customer with TW.

2. All those folders when using IMAP are on the server. POP is only concerned with downloading the messages from the Inbox, and nothing else. Those folders and e-mails will still exist on the server, but POP will not show you them. If you want to use POP instead, you will need to move those folders and e-mails to Local Folders, or you can keep the IMAP account in Thunderbird temporarily while also have the POP account in Thunderbird, so you can move those IMAP folders from the IMAP account to the POP account. Then remove the IMAP account. The difference is having those folders on the server, or on your computer.

3. Yes, IMAP is newer than POP. It is also the primary way most people access e-mail these days. Other than those IMAP folders you created, you would be giving up the ability to see what is in the junk/spam folder on the server, using Thunderbird. If you look at your junk/spam folder now, you will see some e-mails in there that have the orange flame icon, and some don't. The orange flame icon means that Thunderbird said the e-mail was spam, and put it in the junk folder. If the e-mail doesn't have the orange flame icon, it means that your e-mail provider said that the e-mail was spam, and put it there.

You would continue to see the spam that Thunderbird said was spam, but you would not be able to see the spam that the e-mail provider said was spam, unless you logged into your webmail.

Overall, I believe that you will have less problems/headaches if you keep using IMAP, and implement the filter and options changes I recommended for IMAP. It doesn't take long and is not difficult. If you have difficulty with my instructions, please let me know so I can improve them.

Information: IMAP vs POP: http://www.pop2imap.com/