Well, all's well that ends well, for most of us at least.

Martin has some thoughts and safeguard suggestions.

Since moving completely over to gmail, I keep thunderbird around simply to download all of my gmail via POP.

It's not sorted, but it's searchable, and in a pinch, I could find an old email if I (or gmail) was offline.

Yeah, I do the same but was just recently asking myself, "why the redundancy?". With the morrow, oft comes the answer.