How do I download all of my gmail messages to outlook?

Why does my outlook express want to download 15000 old email messages to me that I already have?

• This happens often enough that I am about to try gmail with google if I can't get it corrected. Outlook Express is working great....settings with yahoo email server okay......then one day I log on to server to get new messages and 15000 messages begin to download. I can't stop it. I can't go to yahoo mail and stop it. Can someone help? Another irritation is sometimes my default email client gets changed from outlook express to outlook.....again massive download of email occurs. I which back to outlook express and default email client and I'm okay again...but very irritating....

• Answer:

  Tim - I've just spent 3hours trying to figure out the same thing because in my case the email was fine and then 2hours later I get back and found that I had 3500 emails from 2006 coming in. Seems the IT gurus are causing us this pain as I spent an hour on the tech support line complaining about this issue. Finally get to tech support stage2 he says. Delete all your old emails from webmail and then let outlook download what's left. So to me that was we are pushing to you all your old emails because we don not want them any longer on our server. Nice and subtle approach by AT&T...would have been much better if those PEpoles would have sent a email asking us to spring clean. But oh no now I have to download every email that I do not want to delete that I have on my own computer already downloaded. So now I get the task of going thru my inbox and deleting duplicates. WHAT A MESS AND A THEY WILL GET A CALL MONDAY.