How to Delete Emails from Gmail IMAP Access Mail Client
Gmail IMAP access is now enabled and available for free for all Gmail users. IMAP access ensures that Gmail users who access Gmail inbox via multiple email clients on different device platforms such as Outlook 2003/2007, Outlook Express, iPhone, Blackberry, Thunderbird, Windows Mobile and etc from many locations to always have synchronized version of mails. After configuring email client to access and read Gmail with IMAP protocol, there is problem that emails cannot be deleted, or email still appearing in “All Mail” folder or Gmail web interface mailbox even though you have deleted the emails from Inbox of IMAP folder.
The deleted e-mail at IMAP client not removed from Gmail inbox storage and still been kept is caused by the unique feature of Gmail, which pioneered label technology to categorize mails. In IMAP-enabled Gmail, each IMAP folder is actually a label on the email message, and is not part of actual location of the message. Thus deleting an email message from inbox is actually just removing the inbox label which identifying the message as being in the inbox from the mail message in Gmail engine, and deleting a mail message from a folder means remove custom label on email as when view from Gmail web interface.
Thus, after deleting a message from inbox or one of the custom folders in IMAP client, the message will still appear in [Gmail]/All Mail folder or “All Mail” option from Gmail web view. “All Mail” shows all of e-mail messages, whether or not they have labels attached to them.
In order to delete a email message from all folders in Gmail, or move the mail message to trash by using IMAP email client, users will have to physically move the message to the [Gmail]/Trash folder in the IMAP folders shown in the client. Once the e-mails are moved to Trash folder, it will be automatically purged by Google server process after 30 days. You can also configure your mail client to process purge permanently items mark as trashed or deleted in the original folder automatically from the server. Note that also if you delete any email message from [Gmail]/Spam or [Gmail]/Trash, it will be deleted permanently, locally and on Gmail server.
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April 27th, 2009 20:29
Hello Guru, what entice you to post an article. This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last week.
September 30th, 2008 10:41
I second Jim. I have way too many labels to make a search.
September 30th, 2008 05:41
@kk Yes, that helps, but I use a LOT of labels. So it makes for a very LONG Boolean statement. IT would be nice if they had an operator that allowed you just to identify items without labels.
Thanks. Jim
September 30th, 2008 05:22
kk, yes there is a way to see only archived items (i.e. only items without any tags at all). To do this, search for “-label:inbox AND -label:test” where test would be an extra label you have aside from inbox. If you have multiple labels you need to filter out just add more AND statements like this: “-label:inbox AND -label:test AND -label:test2 AND -label:test3 AND -label:test4″ etc.
The – tells Gmail to search for items without the label “inbox” and also without the other labels. That only leaves label-less items which are what we’re looking for. =)
Hope this helps.
September 6th, 2008 09:18
is there a way to see all mails that have no labels to them because of deleting from IMAP client?
September 4th, 2008 02:14
The behavior you describe seems to have changed. I remember using this some months back and when I deleted a message on the handheld, it was “Archived” in Gmail; that is, it was in “All mail” but not in Inbox or Trash.
I stopped using this for a while and now I’m back and when I delete a message on the handheld, it goes into my Gmail Trash. This is actually NOT what I want since I like Gmail’s Archive feature. I will just get used to not deleting anything on my handheld and hope that when it zaps messages over x days old it won’t auto-trash them on Gmail.
July 21st, 2008 03:09
Note also that “moving” email from one “All Mail” GMail account to another also does NOT delete from the source folder. I signed up for Google Apps Premier — so I had to move my email from my existing GMail account. I learned the details you described above. I also came to realize that if I wanted to safely delete email from my old GMail account, it would be very handy to:
1. have the ability to list emails that had one and only one label. That way, if I wanted to delete them, I could do so without deleting emails that had other labels, AND
2. to be able to list only those emails that had NO labels. Thus, once I had copied all of the emails based on their labels to preserve that structure, I wanted to capture the remaining email by copying “All Mail” — except, it would be much faster to be able to exclude all of the labeled emails.
Maybe you could expand on your article as these questions will become more common.
Best,
Jim