Thanks for elaborating! You raise a lot of good points.

I recently tried to consolidate all of my various email addresses into Thunderbird and oh boy is it fun trying to get a 20 year old Gmail account to cooperate. I often find myself having to open up Gmail in my browser just to get anything more complex than checking or writing new email accomplished. It doesn't help that I have a quarter of a million messages organized between ~70 "folders", I'm sure, but holy hell... it's a nightmarescape. Thunderbird never stops querying the server. I'm about ready to backup all of the old messages and just burn the whole account down.