Gmail labels, UK and US English, Spam/Junk, Bin/Trash - bug?
I am struggling to connect Thunderbird to my Gmail account and get all the labels/folders consistent over all the mail clients I use. I use several mail clients and usually end up with a bunch of labels that duplicate another one, so I am trying to clean it up. I should add that what is below is my best interpretation of what is happening, but it may not be correct.
I have been following the advice here:
and here:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892#zippy=%2Cthunderbird
This is Thunderbird 128.5.0esr (64-bit) on Mac Monterey.
Ok, so I have a Gmail account set up to use UK English. I get labels Spam and Bin.
(If I have a Gmail account set up to use US English, I get Junk and Trash. Got to wonder what Google was thinking in making them different! Oddly enough, US English gets Vacation Responder while UK English gets Out-of-office Autoreply.)
Thunderbird seems to sometimes want to use Junk and Trash, whether set to US English or GB English (=UK). This appears to be tied to the Junk Settings for the account in Thunderbird. If I disable adaptive junk mail controls, I get a new folder called Junk, and the Bin folder seems to be renamed to Trash. If I had not disabled it, presumably TB would have been happy to use Bin and Spam, but the link above suggests disabling it and letting Gmail handle spam. While it is good, it is nowhere near perfect. (If I then re-enable adaptive junk mail controls, nothing changes. It does not go back to what it was. I still have Spam, Trash and Junk.)
However, Gmail itself is still showing labels Spam and Bin and no Junk. In Junk Settings for the account, Destination & Retention, it is possible to tell TB where to put junk messages. In particular, I can sometimes tell it to put the messages in Spam. But not always. Sometimes Spam is not visible as an option but Junk is.
So then I go to Synchronization & Storage, the Advanced button. This shows that Spam and Trash are not checked so will not be downloaded (or uploaded). Junk, however, is checked and will be downloaded.
I think this means that any messages sent to Spam or Trash in TB will not be reflected on Gmail. I guess they will disappear from the original label on Gmail, but will not be visible on any other device accessing the Gmail account. Re-enabling adaptive junk mail controls does not change what is being synchronized.
It all seems a bit flakey. I suspect both links above need updating. In particular, the reference to [Gmail] folder seems out of date since setting up a new account has no references to a folder of that name. All the folders appear at the top level.
And there are definitely some inconsistencies in what TB does.
All Replies (1)
A bit of an explanation of why I do not trust Gmail to handle all spam. This is as I understand it from reading a lot of items about it.
It seems that Google assesses every mail that they process for everyone, to see if it is spam. If you receive one of those messages, it goes in the spam folder. Fine.
If you mark a message in your Inbox as spam, it gets put in your spam folder, and Gmail blocks all messages from that address to you. Afaics, it *does not* assess the content of the message so it will not recognise similar messages in future, perhaps from different addresses. But all messages from that sender in future will end up in the spam folder.
If a message is in your spam folder and you mark it as not spam, Gmail will usually move it back to your Inbox, but sometimes it will end up in All Mail or Trash. And sometimes it will disappear completely, never to be seen again. All new messages from that sender will now be put in your Inbox even if they are spam.
One difficulty here is that often spam is sent from a faked e-mail address which corresponds to a real e-mail address. So if you get a message from the spoofed address and mark it as spam, all genuine messages from that address will also be treated as spam.
Another difficulty is that real spammers do not generally send from the same address, but use a different address each time. So blocking the sender's address is often pointless.
It is not clear whether the messages you mark as spam go into that global pool of messages that determine the contents to be spam. It is also not clear whether just moving a message to the spam folder has this effect. Some mail clients do not have a method to *mark* a message as spam, but just move it to the spam folder.
You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.