I recently upgraded to mac big sur. My gmail has been downloading emails for 5 hours. It says I have 350,000 emails to download. So far 250,000 have downloaded. Should I continue to wait for all the emails to download? I do want access to all of them.
You can continue to use Mail while it is downloading the messages from the server.
You may or may not want to have them all downloaded depending on where they are coming from.
Gmail stores every email sent or received in All Mail. macOS Mail now shows that label as the Archive folder. It started that in Catalina, I think.
In Gmail's settings you may be able to disable All Mail in IMAP on the Labels tab if you don't care to see the archive.
Apparently, newer Gmail accounts do not have the ability to disable showing All Mail in IMAP.
Mac Big Sur Gmail Set Up
