popup says Mail needs to import my messages

In my case the attempt to import fails after anywhere from 20 to 90 % .

"The import failed. An error occurred during the import. make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again."

Lots of room. repeat failures.

After an upgrade, Mail has to rebuild its database. It doesn't matter how you do it, Mail will import the email on the server. The only way to stop it is to remove the email from the server.

What kind of accounts are they? Gmail stores all of your email, even the messages you deleted. You can prevent those from appearing in an IMAP email client (like Mail) in the Label settings on the Gmail web portal. Other servers may have some capacity to restrict what is shown on IMAP.

I am moving from a 2016 MacBook on Monterey 12.7.4 to a 2019 MacBook Pro on Ventura 13.6.7

The first time I opened Mail, I got the message that Mail needed to transfer all messages. I thought no problem, makes sense.... so I said Continue.

Now it's telling me there are 1.3million emails to transfer. NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS do I have that many emails, not even across the 4 Gmail addresses I use.

The only thing I can think of is that Gmail hasn't deleted *anything* in the 15y I've had 3 of the 4 emails or everything is being duplicated because if how I have set up the various accounts.

Barney 15E - if you are still around...... all 4 Gmail accounts are set up as IMAP but I will admit to being a total troglodyte so it's very possible I've not used all the correct settings. At one point, I was having problems accessing the emails from my phone and Macbook as some were missing from either one and I can't operate like that.

Is there anywhere definitive where I can get simple instructions on what settings to use for the different email accounts, to ensure I have all emails whether I'm on my Phone or MacBook - and without saving absolutely every single email since the beginning of time......

TIA

Barney 15E - if you are still around...... all 4 Gmail accounts are set up as IMAP but I will admit to being a total troglodyte so it's very possible I've not used all the correct settings. At one point, I was having problems accessing the emails from my phone and Macbook as some were missing from either one and I can't operate like that.

Is there anywhere definitive where I can get simple instructions on what settings to use for the different email accounts, to ensure I have all emails whether I'm on my Phone or MacBook - and without saving absolutely every single email since the beginning of time......

In Gmail Settings > See All Settings > Labels, find the All Mail label and disable "Show in IMAP"

If you want to actually delete emails when you delete emails,

Under Forwarding and POP/IMAP, turn auto-expunge off. Then, for "When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder:"

Select Move to Trash or Immediately delete from the server. The former will give you a chance to restore from the Trash if you decide later you wanted it.

If they were deleted, they should’ve been deleted from the server, so I don’t know why it would be downloading them again. They should not exist.