GMail IMAP – a Thunderbird fix August 3, 2009
Posted by CLibra in Email, Google, Mozilla, Software.trackback
GMail gets used on a day to day basis by not only me, but a good lot of people on the internet. And although that there’s been a decline in the use of desktop email recently, Thunderbird still has its fans, including me.
However, a while back I encountered a rather irritating issue in Thunderbird, and I assume it’s similar for other desktop clients using GMail; my spam messages were treated as new mail, so Thunderbird would alert me when there was no new email, and because I receive a large volume of junk emails each day, it was becoming rather cumbersome. And to frustrate me even more, if I deleted email from the spam folder in Thunderbird, it’d be moved to the trash folder and not removed properly. I could have unsubscribed from the IMAP folder, but that would have meant losing the ability to send messages to the spam folder from within Thunderbird
Fortunately, GMail’s filters helped me craft a server-side solution to this annoying problem. I created a filter to match the criteria of having the words in:spam and marking such emails as unread. That way, Thunderbird never sees them as new messages, I could still send messages to the spam folder through my client, and GMail would clear it out for me on a regular basis; spam became literally ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
I am a very proficient computer user, teaching everyone everything at work and at home.
I solve all my own problems, constantly, with the power of google and the internet.
Yet this problem has stumped me for a quite a while. I would like to thank you VERY much for your fast simple and effective solution, which has yet gone un-documented entirely by both Mozilla and the Gmail “people”.
I don’t get it ….. why isn’t this problem MUCH more prevalent? I know many people use thunderbird with gmail. They can’t all be reading all that spam ……………… can they?!
Anyway .. thank again. Hope this page gets higher up in the search results (pulled my hair out trying to solve this problem for a while now..)
[...] were unused because I used IMAP. Speaking of IMAP, I recently posted about a fix I came up with to correct Thunderbird’s behaviour in the way it handled the GMail spam folder, as beforehand messages in spam were treated as new mail. Also, you can get a reminder when you [...]