Thunderbird ideal to use gmail for mail storage

Since long I had been eying gmail as a perfect repository for all mails
I receive, even those I delete. However, the catch was that my official
id is nirnimesh_AT_students.iiit.net and I receive mails on this id. I
can forward all my mails and retain a local copy but then I'd have to
visit the same mail twice and forwarding to gmail each time I receive a
mail doesn't seem very nice. I can forward without retaining a local
copy (to avoid repeated checking) but this still necessitates me to
check my mails on gmail, which for reasons obvious enough, I don't want.

Now, however, I've found this feature in Thunderbird which keeps a local
copy of my mails in "Trash" whenever I delete them. So I don't consume a
lot of space on my mail server. Periodically, I can now bounce all my
Trash-ed mails to gmail and that makes my backing up possible too. I use
pine for bouncing these mails, however. I wish Thunderbird provided me
the feature to bounce a mail as well.