Until you get the "lockdown in sector 4" error message and have to sit in the timeout corner to start again. It took me over 48 hours to actually download all my mail out of gmail. (about two years ago.)

Have you actually tried? There is throttling in place, meaning it can take ages depending on your account size.

My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.

Really? Every email application I've used in the past few years asks for your name / email address / password on the first wizard-page. They automatically detect gmail, hook everything up, and start downloading without any further steps.

Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.

I've never had that problem. I have plenty of other annoyances with Thunderbird (so much that I'm paying for what's essentially a custom UI), but it's usually stable. It hasn't complained when I've hooked up a half-dozen accounts, collectively about a half-million emails, and it did everything reasonably quickly.

Hmmm... not seeing the same behavior today. There have been upgrades in the meantime, of course, but I doubt that this was addressed. Must have been something off that day. It did run off and start downloading the header of every single message in my GMail account, which I would rather it didn't as I really only care about the mail that I have received recently (I only use Thunderbird for encrypted emails but the web interface otherwise). That is still annoying, but since I don't want to bad mouth people with false information:

Let the record show that Thunderbird no longer becomes unresponsive for me when accessing my GMail account, must have been a glitch on that day when I first set up GMail in Thunderbird.

haha, I don't mean to imply that it's impossible that it did that, just that it shouldn't be normal :) usually bugs like that are fixed pretty quickly, especially for something as widely-used as gmail.

That's exactly why this thing is useful and appreciated.