Yes. You can uncheck all the options in gmail and it will not sync. That goes for Facebook and Twitter as well.

 

Menu > Settings > Accounts & Sync

Select the account you want and check or uncheck the options.

 

Under those options, in a section called "Manage accounts", you should see your accounts - I have one for Google and one for Weather. Click Google, then, in the settings screen that pops up, turn off the options that you do not want to sync. You can also click the "remove account" button at the bottom.

 

Right.......you have to touch one of your listed accounts, then you can select what to sync or not to sync.

 

When I go Menu > Settings > Accounts & Sync I see the following:

Background Data (box is checked)
Auto-Sync (box is checked)

Manage Accounts
Facebook for HTC
Google
Weather

If I touch Google:
Sync contacts (box is checked)
Sync gmail (box is checked)
Sync calendar (box is checked)

If I have the BACKGROUND DATA box unchecked I do not have the options listed above......see if you have the background data box checked first, then select one of the accounts to manage. Hope that helps!

 

QUESTION: my google search bar isnt working. everytime i click on it..it redirects to the quick search bar! I DO NOT want it to do that...how can i make it stop?

 

So what does having BG Data checked but not Auto-Sync checked get us? That's the way I had it on 1.5, and I could choose when to manually sync gmail (almost never), contacts (only when I added new), and calendar (once a day). I had this setup WHILE I had my Facebook friends' update notifications hit every two hours, and AND I could have my weather set to update every 2 hours.

So now … I have to have both BG Data and Auto-Sync checked because if I don't, I can't get my Facebook notifications and weather updates automatically at selected intervals? Really? This aspect of 2.1 is NOT better than 1.5.