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How can I get Thunderbird and Gmail to work better for deleting emails so that deleted emails from Thunderbird are also deleted in Gmail?

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  • Last reply by Zenos

mk24
mk24
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I use Thunderbird (for the past ~ 10 years) for all of my regular email management and use folder to sort emails, and delete (pressing delete button) emails that I don't need. I checked on gmail and found that I am somehow using 10GB (!) of storage with my email and I have >32,000 emails in the 'All Mail' folder in email. When I open the 'All Mail' folder, it is a mish-mash of emails that I actually want (all have a 'label' equivalent to Thunderbird folder) as well as emails I purposely deleted (or I thought I did) on Thunderbird. How can I configure Thunderbird so that when I delete an email in Thunderbird, it will also delete from Gmail including the 'All Mail' folder? I did see that I hadn't clicked the 'expunge upon exit' button before so I did that today, but emails that I have "deleted" in Thunderbird are still showing up in 'All mail' on gmail. please help! I can't see realistically sorting through 32k emails in gmail to figure out what i want and what I don't... Thank you very much

I use Thunderbird (for the past ~ 10 years) for all of my regular email management and use folder to sort emails, and delete (pressing delete button) emails that I don't need. I checked on gmail and found that I am somehow using 10GB (!) of storage with my email and I have >32,000 emails in the 'All Mail' folder in email. When I open the 'All Mail' folder, it is a mish-mash of emails that I actually want (all have a 'label' equivalent to Thunderbird folder) as well as emails I purposely deleted (or I thought I did) on Thunderbird. How can I configure Thunderbird so that when I delete an email in Thunderbird, it will also delete from Gmail including the 'All Mail' folder? I did see that I hadn't clicked the 'expunge upon exit' button before so I did that today, but emails that I have "deleted" in Thunderbird are still showing up in 'All mail' on gmail. please help! I can't see realistically sorting through 32k emails in gmail to figure out what i want and what I don't... Thank you very much

All Replies (1)

Zenos
Zenos
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That's how gmail works. All your messages live in one big heap, with labels that allow them to be shown in appropriate contexts, such as folders in an email client.

When you delete a message they apply a "deleted" label to it. But they don't remove the message. They believe that users want to undelete things often enough to justify making permanent deletion hard to achieve.

This works for me, or did last time I tried it: go to your deleted/trash folder, right-click it and select "Empty deleted". Compacting or expunging this folder would be a sensible next step too.

You shouldn't need to worry about what is in All Mail. Most users don't really need to be able to see it in their email client. It isn't enabled in any of my five gmail accounts.