How can I prevent shows/movies from auto-downloading?

Question

Hello,
I'm looking for a way to keep my iTunes purchases from using up several hundred gigabytes of hard drive space, and I'm really confused about how to go about doing that.
Let me give an example of the problem:
After I purchase a movie, I'll let iTunes download it and then I'll watch it once. After that, I won't really have any reason to watch the same movie again for a few months or even years. In the meantime, it's just sitting there taking up hard drive space.
Since the iTunes store has already logged my purchase of that movie, shouldn't I just be able to go download that file whenever I feel like it, and delete it from my hard drive when it's not needed?  I think that's a pretty logical approach, and it's kind of the whole point of having all of the media hosted on a central iTunes server.
This is how a lot of other digital media distribution services work - for example, the Steam platform for video games. You can download a game and play it whenever you want, and just delete it when you're done. You can always re-download it later. I figured that iTunes would work the same way.
However, if I delete an item from my library, then iTunes seems to cosntantly want to automatically download it again. I guess I could just perpetually pause the download, but that seems odd. I want to just delete the file for now - I can always download it again later.
I experimented with disabling the "Always Check For Available Downloads" button, but when I do that, I'm not sure how to manually start downloading files that I want.
Any ideas?
Thanks and Best Regards,
Brett

Answer 1

If it's gmail, go to their website and look for the "recent" feature.
Otherwise, and I'm assuming this is IMAP, it's just doing what it's supposed to do; showing you what is on the server. Your best choice is to go to the email provider's website, put messages you don't need to see into their own folder(s) and don't subscribe such folders in Thunderbird.
If it's POP then a new account in Thunderbird doesn't know what you've seen before, so simply gets it all. Beware, it will almost certainly be '''moving '''all the messages from server to client, so don't start deleting things just yet. The "other folders" technique described for IMAP should work here too, as POP doesn't see folders on the server other than the Inbox.