I should be careful what I wish for. On the web page, I got into the detailed account settings.
Settings>Forwarding and POP/IMAP
Found the choices of " Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder " or
" Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages [ 2000, for example] "
I clicked Do Not Limit and my Mac is now downloading roughly 7,900 emails…everything Archived on my web Gmail account.
I did force quite Mail. UNinstalled this account again. On the Web side, chose 2,000 emails .
Went back. Installed it anew on the Mac. It is ignoring the 2,000 and is slowly trying to download almost 8,000 emails.
Brutal.
Well. More tweaking. It is now attempting to download roughly 2,300 emails.
This takes me back to 2017 and while I’m not thrilled, at least I can get into last year’s stuff. I set the limit at 2,000 to an IMAP folder. No clue why it’s pulling more than that but it sure beats 7,900.
Thank you, beowulff, for the guidance. It was indeed a change- that I did not make at all- to the IMAP folder size settings within GMail on the web page.
Hope this resolves it. I hate quirks like this- this is not a page I’ve touched since I opened up this email address and that’s 2008.
I feel your pain.
I recently had to set up an email account that was completely hosed by my ISP. Not only did this require merging all my saved emails (since they lost everything), but setting app a new account. I learned the hard way that setting up a new email account with exactly the same address as an old one (but completely different IMAP and SMTP settings) is not as straightforward as one would expect.
Was it specifically because you wanted to use the same address as the old one?
Yes.
The ISP had two failures - both their primary and backup servers (D’oh!).
I was not ready to simply abandon that email address (which I have had for 30 years). The ISP took their disaster as a sign that they needed to move to a new email system, and that changed the addresses of the IMAP and SMTP servers.