Strange iOS/GMail interaction

When I logged on to my GMail web interface (the way I normally work with it), I found a new label named [Google Mail]/Trash. It had a dozen or so messages that I recently deleted via Mail on my iPhone.

I confirmed that deleting messages from the phone was moving them to this new label instead of to the normal Trash folder.

I’m not sure specifically what the cause was, but I did all of the following which seems to have fixed it:

  • Powered-off and rebooted the phone
  • Went into mail settings, and for each of the major categories of folders (Drafts, Deleted, Archive), I reset each one to the “On My Phone” local folder, and then set them all back to the correct server-side folders:

And then it all seemed to work properly again.

I don’t know what the cause might be, but I’m guessing that Google changed their internal label-name that they use for Trash, so when iOS used the old name, it showed up as a new label. Then changing the folder elsewhere and back reset it to the new name provided by the server.

At least that’s my working theory until I learn otherwise.