Mail and Gmail Problems

Hey everyone. Hope there is someone who can help me with this issue.
I have an iMac running Snow Leopard. I have been trying to get my Gmail configured with Mail and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or what.

I just want mail to start receiving mail as of now...I don't want it to download the thousands of emails I have in my Gmail. I don't use folders in Gmail so I am not concerned about those. I just want it to work.

I have tried configuring with imap and every time it tries to download the 8000 messages that are in my gmail. I decided to try with pop3 and same thing...this is even after I went to my gmail settings and told it to enable pop for all messages received as of now.

There is also an issue now with my Blackberry receiving my emails from my gmail.
Apparently I'm breaking everything. Please help!!

If your inbox on Gmail contains lots of e-mails either way it will "download" them.

Now, IMAP is not really a download but rather a portal to the server. Mail resides on the server and when you delete something in Mail it will remove it from the server.

POP actually downloads the mail to the local machine removing it from the server.

As I said, either way you are going to download whatever is in your inbox unless you go up to Gmail and go into settings. There you can setup POP to only give you the stuff that arrives from that point forward.

DaFlake said:

Now, IMAP is not really a download but rather a portal to the server. Mail resides on the server and when you delete something in Mail it will remove it from the server.

Click to expand...

That depends on what you've selected for the "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" setting for the account.