How Android Gmail app stores messages locally

[kyk]

I have had my Gmail account on my destop PC for many years, so I have many many thousands of old messages, which take several Gigabytes of Gmail cloud storage, say 10Gb.

Now I want to setup Gmail app on my Android phone. Will it download all those old messages and store them locally on my Android phone?

If so, will it need 10Gb of local phone storage? Will it matter if messages are archived or not?

Can I limit the number of locally stored messages? Say, only messages for the last 3 months?

Can I set phone's SD card for message storage?

[aleh]

Мобильные клиенты не скачивают все с облака. Только то, что вы скачаете вручную

Sent from my HUAWEI ALE-L04 using Tapatalk

[AndreyT]

Now I want to setup Gmail app on my Android phone. Will it download all those old messages and store them locally on my Android phone?
If so, will it need 10Gb of local phone storage? Will it matter if messages are archived or not?

No, by default it will not download them all.

Gmail can "sync" (download) some messages to local phone storage. You can choose what messages to sync on per-label basis, i.e. you can chose which specific labels you want to download. By default, only Inbox(es) is/are downloaded.

For each label you can choose 1) not to sync at all, 2) sync all messages, or 3) sync only last N days of messages.

Number of days N is a user-selectable setting, although it is a global setting: it applies across all labels, for which you chose option 3 from the above list.

Can I limit the number of locally stored messages? Say, only messages for the last 3 months?

You can specify the number of days to sync. You can't specify the exact number of messages to sync.

Can I set phone's SD card for message storage?

No, AFAIK.