Lu Wei wrote:
I encounter a strange behavior of my Gmail. I use Thunderbird 52.9.1
under WinXP. It used to work fine, apart from connection failure from
time to time due to the great firewall of china. So I sometimes log into
web UI to check, because web tools for wall-breaking is easier to find
and work. Today after I logged into web UI, I found some recent mails
not received, and would like to read them in TB. I managed to run Tor
successfully, and use F5 to refresh mail. The status bar shows the
normal process, and after showing "downloading message 1 of 1", the
process finished. Press F5 again, another message is downloaded, and on
and on.

Has anyone seen this? What might be the cause?


If Thunderbird was using POP (not IMAP), and if TBird was also using
Gmail's normal mode (not Gmail's "recent" mode), then I would expect
TBird to pull about 250 emails each time. The reason is that Gmail
will provide only the oldest 250 conversations that haven't been
popped yet.

REF: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6089246

I can only speculate that because the Tor network is so slow, Gmail
has reduced the 250 to a smaller number for you.