Thunderbird Mail folders
Hello, my gmail account has got three folders for emails I'd like to delete/trashed/put into junk mail; their names are Junk, [Gmail]Trash, Trash. Only one of those folders seems to be working, ie when I click the trash can icon, where actually does the message go if there's no Deleted emails folder?? The Junk and Trash folders have never had any discarded messages in them, so they seem not to be working. [Gmail]Trash seems to work as it filters out recent trash... What happens to it though? What's the time frame for being in this folder? In my limited ideas about setting things up, I'd reckon the main problems are the inactive two folders mentioned above and a missing Deleted Emails folder. But how to go about this?
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Gmail groups the special folders on the IMAP server (more precisely what Gmail calls system labels, which includes the special IMAP folders but also other Gmail labels) under a [Gmail] folder. Recent versions of Thunderbird hide that parent folder from the user in the folder pane, but you may still see the folder hierarchy on the IMAP server when selecting folders in other places.
Tell Thunderbird to use the same folders that Gmail uses for those purposes in the corresponding panes of the Account Settings, unless you do want Thunderbird to use a different folder on purpose for some reason. You may then delete any other folders with similar names that neither Gmail nor Thunderbird after having made the changes will use.
As an example of why that matters, Gmail's Bin/Trash is the only way you have in Thunderbird to permanently delete messages from Gmail server. Unless you move a message there first, there is no way for Thunderbird (or any other mail client) to permanently delete a message from the Gmail server. Gmail automatically removes messages from there (and from the server as a result) after 30 days if you don't do it earlier.
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