[opensuse] archive folders in thunderbird
Hello all, I am confused about how thunderbird archives emails, and what I have set up that is not working the way I would like. I am using Thunderbird 17.0.2, but this has been going on for some time. I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives". In the email account that I receive the emails from this list, the archives folder shows that there are 18,033 unopened emails. I checked to verify, and if I delete an individual email in its proper folder in my regular folder list, it also deletes it from the archives folder. In the same way, if I delete an individual email from the archives folder, it is also deleted from the corresponding proper email folder. For example, I have a folder called "SCD" under this IMAP email account, and I tested the deletion operation both ways. However, there is a discrepancy between the archives folder and other folders. For example the earliest email I have in the folder SCD is from January 10, only 5 days ago. Yet the archives folder shows all the emails I used to have in that folder going back by about 6 months. I have googled and I can't figure out what exactly the archives folder is doing. Is it supposed to just mirror all my email that is in all my other folders? if so, why does it have copies of all the emails that I have deleted? On the other hand, are the archives folders supposed to be for emails you want to keep separate from your daily operational folders, but don't want to lose? If that is the case, why is that if I delete an email from an archive folder, its corresponding email in its regular folder is also deleted? It seems that my archives folder is doing half of one purpose and half of another, and being rendered a useless item that takes up a lot of memory, but cannot be deleted without risking deleting all my current email. Thanks, -- George Olson Box #1: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | ATI Radeon HD 3300 | 16GB Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | nVidia C61 GeForce 7025 | 4GB Laptop: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | Intel HD Graphics 3000 | 8GB learning openSUSE and loving it -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead. Thus you can have thousands of archived emails. -- Cheers, Carlos E.R. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 01/15/2013 06:26 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead. Thus you can have thousands of archived emails.
Ah, so it is because of gmail! So then what do most people that have gmail end up doing with the archive? I suppose the main thing is that I don't want to cache the archive on my hard disk. But also, I see no reason to keep it, as long as I have all the emails I want to keep in other folders. Because another 2 or 3 years of this and I will have 100,000 emails or more in these folders. I don't need all those. -- George Olson Box #1: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | ATI Radeon HD 3300 | 16GB Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | nVidia C61 GeForce 7025 | 4GB Laptop: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | Intel HD Graphics 3000 | 8GB learning openSUSE and loving it -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 01/15/2013 02:50 PM, George Olson wrote:
Because another 2 or 3 years of this and I will have 100,000 emails or more
- believe that gmail does have an 'option' to delete [not archive] email after download .............. best regards -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 15/01/13 21:26, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead. Thus you can have thousands of archived emails.
Are you absolutely sure about this? There is a setting in Account Settings>Server where you can select to either delete the mail or leave it on the server. And if you leave it on the server at gmail you then come up against gmail's internal settings whereby mail is deleted either after a certain period or when you hit your max allocated disc space (?10 GB?). BC -- Using openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 KDE 4.10.0 & kernel 3.7.2-1 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 01/15/2013 09:12 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
On 15/01/13 21:26, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead. Thus you can have thousands of archived emails.
Are you absolutely sure about this? There is a setting in Account Settings>Server where you can select to either delete the mail or leave it on the server. And if you leave it on the server at gmail you then come up against gmail's internal settings whereby mail is deleted either after a certain period or when you hit your max allocated disc space (?10 GB?).
BC
From Google help at http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32608 : ---------------- If you're positive you won't need a message again, use the Delete button to send it to Trash.* Deleting unimportant mail is a great way to free up some of your storage, but with Gmail's free storage, you can probably keep those messages, too! If it's possible that you'll need a message or conversation in the future, we recommend archiving. Archiving mail moves messages out of your inbox and into your "All Mail" label for safekeeping-- you won't be bothered with extra messages cluttering your inbox, but you'll still be able to find a message if you need it six years from now! *Deleted messages and conversations are permanently removed from Gmail 30 days after you send them to Trash. ----------------- However, I just deleted hundreds of messages out of various subfolders in Thunderbird. The strange thing was, any message that I deleted which were relatively new, those messages were also deleted from the archive folder. I used 2 processes to delete the messages. One was by setting a retention policy on each individual folder - those were automatically deleted from TB. The other was by simply selecting the messages and deleting them. I think the way it works as I am reading your messages and reading up on things is that every email that comes into gmail goes to the "all mail" folder, which is also the archive folder. Then it gets a label as "inbox" but is not actually placed in a separate folder on the server - it just gets the label. If it is moved to another folder, it is simply given a replacement label (unless a copy is made in which it gets 2 labels). So perhaps when TB automatically deleted old emails in folders based on my retention policy, all that was sent up to the server was a scratching off of the label; hence, those emails all remain in the archive folder. However, when I manually selected and hit "delete", perhaps this actually moved these emails to the trash folder, in which case they are gone as soon as the trash is emptied. This would also explain why something in archives (all mail) that is manually deleted is also deleted in the separate folder (like SCD) where I store it for my records. There were not 2 copies of the email, only 1 with an extra label for the subfolder. (Of course, my subfolders are stored for offline use while the archives are not, so that means there are actually 2 copies in existence.) Does that sound right? If so, then it puts a bit of a difficulty into the long term management of these emails with TB. Because using the retention policy to delete all but the most recent 200 emails in a given folder (for example) is very helpful for managing and not having to go through every 3 months and delete thousands of emails manually. But I also want those emails cleared off the server entirely, not just have their labels scratched off so they remain in the all mail archive folder on the server. The end result of google's way of doing things is that in 2 or 3 years when the archive box is filled up, it will be quite difficult to go through and select the hundreds of thousands of emails that are actually unwanted from the folder, but retain all the ones that I made the effort to store separately so that they could be kept forever. Should this be a feature request in TB, that in the retention policy it actually deletes the emails the same as if you hit the delete key? or am I misreading the whole thing? -- George Olson Box #1: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | ATI Radeon HD 3300 | 16GB Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.1 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | nVidia C61 GeForce 7025 | 4GB Laptop: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | Intel HD Graphics 3000 | 8GB learning openSUSE and loving it -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 16/01/13 12:09, George Olson wrote:
On 01/15/2013 09:12 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
On 15/01/13 21:26, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead. Thus you can have thousands of archived emails.
Are you absolutely sure about this? There is a setting in Account Settings>Server where you can select to either delete the mail or leave it on the server. And if you leave it on the server at gmail you then come up against gmail's internal settings whereby mail is deleted either after a certain period or when you hit your max allocated disc space (?10 GB?).
BC
From Google help at http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32608 :
---------------- If you're positive you won't need a message again, use the Delete button to send it to Trash.*
Deleting unimportant mail is a great way to free up some of your storage, but with Gmail's free storage, you can probably keep those messages, too! If it's possible that you'll need a message or conversation in the future, we recommend archiving.
Archiving mail moves messages out of your inbox and into your "All Mail" label for safekeeping-- you won't be bothered with extra messages cluttering your inbox, but you'll still be able to find a message if you need it six years from now!
*Deleted messages and conversations are permanently removed from Gmail 30 days after you send them to Trash. -----------------
However, I just deleted hundreds of messages out of various subfolders in Thunderbird. The strange thing was, any message that I deleted which were relatively new, those messages were also deleted from the archive folder.
[pruned] I stopped using the Archive feature some months back so I am now relying on my memory rather than 'facts' :-) . I think you will find that Archive works the same as when you DELETE a message from a folder. It goes into the TRASH folder but is not actually deleted from your system until you Delete Trash. So, when you archive all you are doing is moving the file(s), ie messages, from whichever folder to the Archive folder(s). But not really knowing how you have set up your TB re your gmail account in your Account Settings I cannot comment further, sorry. [pruned] BC -- Using openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 KDE 4.10.0 & kernel 3.7.2-1 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 16/01/13 01:09, George Olson wrote: [...] I don't use gmail, but I do use IMAP, with a mailbox size limit of 1GB on my provider's server. I have set up Thunderbird to Archive locally (ie on this machine). This means that stuff I want to keep gets archived on my home machine. Most folders (eg mailing lists) have been set to delete mail older than 3 months, but some personal mail is kept indefinitely. Once a year, I archive mail in these folders that is older than 1 year, which means it gets stored locally and is deleted from the IMAP server. I do this archiving exercise in February, so as not to break any current threads. This works very well. I think your problem is a result of Google wanting to do everything for you. Of course, they are happy to keep all your mail as they are a data collection company. ;) Bob -- Bob Williams System: Linux 3.4.11-2.16-desktop Distro: openSUSE 12.2 (x86_64) with KDE Development Platform: 4.9.5 "release 3" Uptime: 06:00am up 1 day 13:12, 4 users, load average: 1.00, 0.97, 1.56 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2013-01-16 a las 09:09 +0800, George Olson escribió:
I think the way it works as I am reading your messages and reading up on things is that every email that comes into gmail goes to the "all mail" folder, which is also the archive folder.
I think so, yes. I have a different problem with this: I had to use temporarily another partition with a new thunderbird install. And thunderbird insisted on syncronizing mail with gmail. Usually no much problem, if you have the space and bandwidth - and I had neither. My current mobile ISP limits me to 500 MB/month. I had to fight thunerbird settings a lot to convince it not to sync. I'm not sure if I succeeded, I downloaded perhaps 300M of my share... :-/ - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 "Celadon" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlD2iWcACgkQja8UbcUWM1yd6AD8Df+naxCDvEgW9XYss9ux9Zq0 FYNIRckO8No5g2yf2tEA/RyBOkcm7WW/CW+gC8nziiqQQ3Uwwe6dsSy53IlZoKPU =iCHV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead.
With normal IMAP, when the message is read, it is moved from /new/ to /cur/ - does google do something else? -- Per Jessen, Zürich (1.0°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On Tuesday 15 January 2013 14:14:40 Per Jessen wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead.
With normal IMAP, when the message is read, it is moved from /new/ to /cur/ - does google do something else?
That is not imap, that is the maildir format, who knows what google uses on their servers Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
Anders Johansson wrote:
On Tuesday 15 January 2013 14:14:40 Per Jessen wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2013-01-15 05:41, George Olson wrote:
I have 4 IMAP email accounts, and for some reason Thunderbird has only 2 of them with corresponding folders listed under "Archives".
Remember that gmail accounts are different. With a normal ISP when you fetch an email it disapears. With gmail they are archived instead.
With normal IMAP, when the message is read, it is moved from /new/ to /cur/ - does google do something else?
That is not imap, that is the maildir format, who knows what google uses on their servers
True, I was thinking dovecot behaviour. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (1.1°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
participants (7)
-
Anders Johansson -
Basil Chupin -
Bob Williams -
Carlos E. R. -
ellanios82 -
George Olson -
Per Jessen