The end result is that ‘All Mail’ will contain a duplicate of your whole inbox, which can take Gb’s worth of precious space on your harddisk, as well as cluttering search results. And let’s face it, a lot of people don’t bother with assigning labels to emails which were dealt with. But ‘All Mail’ is assigned to each and every message which hasn’t been moved to any folders. Now, self-explanatory labels folders such as ‘important’, ‘bin’ and ‘spam’ probably don’t get too full, so it’s not a big deal. But of course that’s not possible what happens instead, is that Thunderbird creates one duplicate of the messages for each label. So if a message has three labels, it will appear as if it’s stored in three folders. But Thunderbirds’ abstraction is folders, and it convert labels to them. Gmail doesn’t actually have folders its main abstraction is labels. You should get rid of them as soon as possible. And … that’s all there is to it Unsubscribe from ‘All Mail’ and other standard foldersīesides the folders you may have created yourself, Gmail has a few standard ones like ‘important’, ‘all mail’, ‘spam’, and so on.

If you use a password manager don’t enter a passowrd in Thunderbird - just click ‘OK’, and the program will use OpenID to open a web browser window where you can authorize the app. Just select ‘File > New > Existing account’ and enter your email address and pick IMAP. Wiring up Thunderbird to use a Gmail account is simplicity itself. It has some UX oddities (like having four different types of search) but all in all it’s a no brainer, really Setting up Thunderbird to work with Gmail It’s a modern, cross platform, community developed mail program battle harded for decades.

Thunderbird osx