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How can I add a Gmail label to every message in a Thunderbird Local Folder?

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  • Last reply by DavidGG

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For years when I shop online I have been manually moving order confirmation emails to a Local Folder called "Orders" so I can search them do e.g. reorder items. When I began using Thunderbird as a Gmail client, I continued the practice. But this isn't a Gmail-centric way of doing things, and I can't search my Thunderbird local folder when I'm accessing Gmail remotely on my phone.

So going forward I want to add the Gmail label "Orders" to each order confirmation email. But what do I do with my legacy Thunderbird Local Folder messages? I need some way to tell Thunderbird: 'For each message in this Local Folder, tell Gmail to label it with the Gmail label "Orders"'. Is there an easy way to do that? If not, is there some way I could harvest the Message IDs of the messages and run some script (perhaps one I have to write myself)?

There are >2,000 messages in the folder, so doing this by hand one-by-one is simply not a viable option. I'm happy to roll up my sleeves and do some scripting work though. Thanks for any advice, even if it is just "you're out of luck". :)

For years when I shop online I have been manually moving order confirmation emails to a Local Folder called "Orders" so I can search them do e.g. reorder items. When I began using Thunderbird as a Gmail client, I continued the practice. But this isn't a Gmail-centric way of doing things, and I can't search my Thunderbird local folder when I'm accessing Gmail remotely on my phone. So going forward I want to add the Gmail label "Orders" to each order confirmation email. But what do I do with my legacy Thunderbird Local Folder messages? I need some way to tell Thunderbird: 'For each message in this Local Folder, tell Gmail to label it with the Gmail label "Orders"'. Is there an easy way to do that? If not, is there some way I could harvest the Message IDs of the messages and run some script (perhaps one I have to write myself)? There are >2,000 messages in the folder, so doing this by hand one-by-one is simply not a viable option. I'm happy to roll up my sleeves and do some scripting work though. Thanks for any advice, even if it is just "you're out of luck". :)

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NEVERMIND. I figured out how to do it. It was a stupid question. I couldn't find a way to delete the question. Sorry.

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I'm surprised you figured how to do it, because you really can't. Gmail labels are mapped to folders on the IMAP server, but they're not the same thing, because a message can have multiple labels in Gmail, but be in a single folder in IMAP. In order to apply a Gmail label to a message without removing any other labels it may have, you would have to copy the message to the IMAP folder corresponding to that label. But that copy would be treated as a different message from the original in the mail client, not as a message that's in multiple folders at the same time…

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