On Lu, 21 iun 21, 16:22:42, Gary L. Roach wrote: > > For some years, I have been using Thunderbird on Debian with no problems. > Over a year ago I switched to gmail.com (Imap server) for my mail server. > Everything went fine until about 6 months ago . All of a sudden I had an > All-Mail folder that wasn't there before. It most certainly was there, but maybe your Thunderbird wasn't showing it (i.e. 'subscribed'). > Since then all of my Emails are > bypassing my InBox and my filters. I decided to sort out the All-Mail by > creating a new set of filters and running them on the All-Mail box. I > completely cleaned out all 4000 or so Emails. It's not clear, but it seems you are referring to *local* filters (Gmail has it's own filtering facility). E.g. I have a rule to archive and mark as read all messages that are To or Cc debian-user (but not from other Debian lists), so I don't ever see the message in my Gmail Inbox if you ever Cc: me on debian-user ;) > As soon as I restarted > Thunderbird all of the old Emails were downloaded from the web and re-filled > the All-Mail box. Nothing in the InBox. In addition, I now have multiple > copies of the same messages in all of my local folders. In short I have a > real mess on my hands. I have seen various solutions on the web but none > seem to work. I also noted that pop servers, unlike imap servers, store all > of the files on the local computer. Could switching to pop solve this > problem? Are there any other solutions? Please help. POP3 is basically just a simple method to download messages locally and optionally delete them from the server. As far as I know IMAP4 can do everything POP3 can, and more. For your particular issue it probably won't help at all. Quick solution for your problem: just 'unsubscribe' from the 'All Mail' folder and carry on. Long answer: 1. There is only one copy of each message on Gmail, ever.[1] 2. Messages can have one or more 'Labels', that are exposed as separate folders via IMAP (or POP if you prefer that). 3. Except for messages in 'Thrash' and 'Spam' every message *also* has the Label 'All Mail'. It might help to think of it as *the* storage / archive for *all* your messages that you still want to keep. 4. Consequently the only way to permanently remove messages from 'All Mail' is to delete them (move to 'Trash') or mark them as spam (move to 'Spam'). Both actions will also remove them from *every* other Label/IMAP folder. A side effect of all of the above is that marking a message as read in one Label/IMAP folder will also mark it as read in every other Label/IMAP folder it (still) exists, because it's the same message from Gmail's point of view[2]. [1] This is a long-standing issue for list subscribers that receive list mail at the same Gmail address they are using for posting. Gmail just drops the message returning via the list (because there is already a copy in 'Sent') and they can't tell if the message went through without checking the archives. Because of this I just gave up and subscribed a GMX address to the list, with the added advantage (for me) of classic IMAP support. [2] This can actually be helpful for big threads cross-posted to two or more lists you are subscribed to, though in general I prefer to have separate copies and read/unread state of messages for each list. Hope this helps, Andrei -- http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser
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