I don't think Hotmail or Outlook can be downloaded into Thunderbird, can they? Just like Yahoo mail. Those free versions require that you either use the paid-for Outlook version or you use the web access to the account. It was startling and refreshing that gmail would not only make it easy to download your account mail into an email client, that they would put up instructions and make it so easy. Now with Thunderbird it knows how to set up Gmail accounts in a way that it is almost seamless.

Yahoo lets you download if you pay an annual fee for the Yahoo account (or they used to - it has been years since I used Yahoo mail much.) I don't know about Outlook - is there a way to pay a fee to download the messages into a client like Thunderbird?

SRS