At work we use Gmail for all our work email. I recently had to set up macOS Mail with this Gmail account again from scratch due to authentication issues (legacy account etc.). All of that seems to have gone well except for one minor but annoying issue I just cannot figure out.
When I send an email through this Gmail account using Mail, it doesn’t end up in the Gmail Sent folder, but rather lumped in with everything else in the Gmail Archive folder, which, I believe, is actually what Gmail calls All Mail (and Apple Mail just refers to as Archive). I did make sure that the account settings in Mail show Sent as target for sent email in the mailbox behavior section. So all appears good there too.
The odd thing is that if I have Gmail open in a web browser and showing the Sent section, as soon as I send an email, I can see that it shows up in there, but then mysteriously disappears again within seconds. I then find it over in All Mail. I have no idea what is doing what appears to be a move. I certainly have no Mail rules doing that. Is there some kind of Gmail rule option that I’m not aware of? I have to admit I almost never use the web interface for it and have no idea where any such rules or options would be hidden away.
Any ideas what is going on here and how I could make sure email sent with Mail makes its way into the Gmail Sent folder and stays there? Having to go fish out all those sent emails by hand and move them over to Sent is a bit of a pain, not to mention such a waste of time.
I believe this only happens for brand new emails. I do not see the same issue occur when replying to an email. There, the reply goes to Sent and stays there. But compose a brand new email, and I can reproduce it right away.
I think there are some incompatibilities between Apple’s Mail apps and Gmail. My ongoing problem is some incoming emails go to the Archive folder, no matter what filters I set up on Gmail’s web site. I’ve never gone any further in trying to fix it beyond setting up filters/rules though.
Gmail is weird compared with most mail servers - it puts literally all mail in the All Mail label (or folder, as it appears in a mail client), including mail still in the In Box (so it’s not a proper Archive folder) and mail in Sent mail. This leads to a lot of duplication (for example, when searching) in a mail client like Mail.app.
So, this is how I set up Gmail:
In Gmail in a browser, go to Settings / See All Settings / Labels
On the “All Mail” line, all the way to the right, turn off “Show in IMAP”
On the same page, scrolled down, under the “LABELS” section, click the button “Create New Label”. I name mine “Archive”. By default the setting “Show in IMAP” should be turned on.
In Mail.app, open Preferences, go to the “Account” tab, and click on the Gmail account.
Under “Mailbox Behaviors”, change “Archive” to the new label you created in step 3
Plus, of course, if you are using Mail on iOS/iPadOS, don’t forget to change the Archive folder in Advanced Settings in Settings / Apps / Mail / Accounts / [Your Gmail Account] / Account Settings / Advanced (a big for that ).
Now everything that you archive in Mail.app will go into that folder (and it will still be in “All Mail” on webmail), and you won’t have an “All Mail” folder in Mail.app (so you won’t see sent mail in that folder.)
Just remember if you use webmail at all with the account to archive your messages by applying the “Archive” label rather than doing just the stock archive command. And if you have existing messages in All Mail that are not in the In Box as well, you may want to add the Archive label. Quick tip: in Gmail on the web, in the search box, enter the following search:
has:nouserlabels -in:Inbox -in:Draft -in:Sent
It should find everything that you’ve archived that isn’t in your new Archive folder.
All of my sent mail shows up in my Sent folder, so I can’t help you with that one.
Yep. GMail has no concept of folders. There is just one giant bag of messages per user.
GMail organizes mail by tagging and searching. You can apply as many or as few tags as you want, and there are buttons (in the web interface) that allows you to filter the view by tag. These tags include “Inbox” and “Trash”.
When you use an IMAP interface, each tag is presented as a folder. More accurately what Apple would call a smart folder.
The “All Mail” IMAP folder is the one that presents everything (more specifically, everything that does not have the “Trash” tag).
Yes, you can disable which tags are presented via IMAP, but I think that cripples the interface. But I’m the wrong person to ask here, because I primarily use the web interface. I do very little from an app (Mail on iOS and Thunderbird on macOS).
But note that you can delete all of a message’s tags. If you do, it will only be visible in the All Mail section of the web interface (or the corresponding IMAP folder). But I don’t think you can get into that situation using IMAP, since IMAP thinks it is moving a message between folders - which Google handles by adding one tag and removing another.
What a mess? I have a couple of secondary emails coming through gmail, but most of my mail comes through my personal domain into Apple Mail, and the Gmail accounts also going into Apple Mail. (I almost never go directly into Gmail.) I have some of the Apple Mail from one of those gmails that comes from a mailing list put into file in OnMyMac, where I read it when I have time. For reasons unknown, those emails also are stuck into the Archive for that Gmail account, and unread copies from mail that came since mid-January are remaining in the Archive file despite the fact that I read the mail in the OnMyMac and unread copies that I did not discard are still sitting in the Archive while what I trashed is gone. Everything is in IMAC with one exception – an OFFLINE POP copy the one Gmail having the unwanted duplicates. I have not removed it because Apple Mail warns me all the mail will be lost despite the fact that I also have an ONLINE IMAC copy of the same file. How can I get rid of all the unread POP mail without losing all the copies other copies of mail from the IMAP copy of the file?
Hi again. For some reason I can no longer see in TidBITS Talk who or what a reply is to. But I think you’re saying you couldn’t find forwarding rules in gmail? You can skip the rest of this email if not.
I use them to forward all mail to my iCloud account, as follows:
for that ).