Set Mozilla Thunderbird to download all the messages in locale, but excluding the attachments

I couldn't find an option to let Thunderbird download all the messages from my email server, but excluding only the attachments in order to save space. Is there such an option?

This is set by email account in Thunderbird.

Using the three line (hamburger) menu in the top right of TB select Account Settings.

The for each account select Synchronisation and Storage in the left pane and set the flags for Disk Space as required.

You can select to say Don't download messages larger than and set a limit in kB and to recover disk space to, eg delete messages older than n days or more than n most recent.

"Downloading messages without attachments" would be, correctly speaking, extracting only text/plain (and/or text/html) MIME part(s) of the message and skipping all other parts.

But this is not possible (not only in Thunderbird but in any email client that uses POP or IMAP), because POP or IMAP protocols don't know anything about MIME message structure. They only see the message contents as a whole, just a stream of bytes.

Downloading only text/plain and or text/html parts without the other parts would require special software on both server and client side, and a custom protocol that isn't just plain POP or IMAP - at least a custom (non-standard) extension to them, or rather a completely new protocol designed from scratch.

Some proprietary e-mail systems that use their own proprietary protocols can do this (for example MS Outlook with MS Exchange as a server - but only with MS Exchange as a server, as these two use their own protocol and not a standard one like POP or IMAP).