mail problems

[freshgirl]

I just got a Macbook Air and set up my mail account, and mail wants to download more than 60K messages from my gmail.
1) will this take up tons of space?
2)is there a way to stop it from doing this without going in and manually deleting each message? I don't need all the old mails to be on my computer.
3) is there a way to clear out mail completely, and start over?

Thanks!
Rebecca

 

[BrianBaughn]

Is your Gmail account set up as IMAP on your MacBook Air? If so, in your Mac's Mail account options (under "advanced" in snow leopard) you can set "Keep Messages..." to "Don't Keep Copies...".