Download only certain POP messages

Normally when you check for new messages in a POP3 account, all new messages are downloaded. However, you may want to only retrieve messages meeting certain criteria. One way to do this is to fetch only the headers and then set up a message filter to determine which should be downloaded.

You can configure Thunderbird to download only the message headers via "Tools → Account Settings → Server Settings → Fetch headers only." You can then create a message filter that tests (for example) whether the sender was in your address book, and checkmark the "fetch body from POP server" action for the filter. If you have a slow internet connection and don't want to automaticly download large messages you could also test whether the size is less than some limit. In this way, any valid message filter rule can be used to determine whether you want to download the message body.

Any messages whose message body wasn't downloaded will display "Only the headers for this message were downloaded from the mail server. Click here to download the rest of the message." instead of the actual message body. If you click on that link it will cause Thunderbird to download the message body.