Number of email in All mail folder in macmail different than on webmail

[macgrl]

Just a quick question that has been bugging me...

I have gmail set up with imap to mail on my mac.

Under the archive heading in mailboxes in mail is the folder for the account with (all mail) after it. I assume this is the imap folder for all mail?

If I right click and select account info I get a list of folders and messages in them. The mail box "archive" in this list has 9,576 messages but the all mail folder on gmail webmail has 6,139.

Then nearly all the other imap folders in mail have more messages in them than the corresponding folder / label in webmail....

Why is this? Have some messages got lost? Or is the just a quirk of the whole gmail labels system v folders in imap?

 

[satcomer]

Gmail Labels don't transfer to 10.9 Mail hardly at all. So turn off Gmail labels in Gmail web Preferences.

 

[Parsec]

Ok, I can offer only a possible explanation. So, it's a guess.

Apple Mail doesn't support gMail 'labels'. Labels is as far as I know unique to gMail. In order for Mail to cope with it, my guess is that the mails that have more than one label get copied to different folders in Mail, hence being counted more than once

 

[BrianBaughn]

I think the answers here are on the right track. Gmail being its own beast concerning IMAP just won't make sense when doing a comparison like that.

Unless you find the "All Mail" folder useful on your Mac you should uncheck "Show in IMAP" for it at the Gmail website in Settings>Labels. It's just dupes of what's in other folders and likely doubles the amount of space taken on your Mac. It probably slows down email syncing, also.

 

[Weaselboy]

I think the answers here are on the right track. Gmail being its own beast concerning IMAP just won't make sense when doing a comparison like that.

Unless you find the "All Mail" folder useful on your Mac you should uncheck "Show in IMAP" for it at the Gmail website in Settings>Labels. It's just dupes of what's in other folders and likely doubles the amount of space taken on your Mac. It probably slows down email syncing, also.

It does not do this any longer with Mavericks. You need to check show in IMAP for all mail now and Mail sorts it out. It can take time to reindex and do this though.

 

[BrianBaughn]

It does not do this any longer with Mavericks. You need to check show in IMAP for all mail now and Mail sorts it out. It can take time to reindex and do this though.

It does for me. 10.9.2 and I had Mail configured with "All Mail" unchecked at the Gmail site. Just quit Mail, checked the box for "Show in IMAP" for "All Mail", restarted mail and it downloaded over 7000 messages (the entirety of the concerned account) and my Users/username/Library/Mail/V2/theaccount folder went from 1.45GB to 2.5GB.

 

[Weaselboy]

It does for me. 10.9.2 and I had Mail configured with "All Mail" unchecked at the Gmail site. Just quit Mail, checked the box for "Show in IMAP" for "All Mail", restarted mail and it downloaded over 7000 messages (the entirety of the concerned account) and my Users/username/Library/Mail/V2/theaccount folder went from 1.45GB to 2.5GB.

Can you do a test and leave it on and running overnight? From what I have read it takes about a day to index all this crap and sort itself out and get rid of the dupes.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Can you do a test and leave it on and running overnight? From what I have read it takes about a day to index all this crap and sort itself out and get rid of the dupes.

Not that many emails so it didn't even take all night! Not only did it not increase the size of the email folder, it decreased it by 1/3. I suppose this is because of dupes I had across folders that didn't "sort itself out" as you say via the All Mail folder.

I'm wondering how this works and why it hasn't been implemented this way before. Did someone at Apple call someone at Google and get a hint? Also, if Mail is able to deal with these Gmail labels, it would be nice if Mail would show every folder that a particular message is in.

 

[Weaselboy]

Not that many emails so it didn't even take all night! Not only did it not increase the size of the email folder, it decreased it by 1/3. I suppose this is because of dupes I had across folders that didn't "sort itself out" as you say via the All Mail folder.

I'm wondering how this works and why it hasn't been implemented this way before. Did someone at Apple call someone at Google and get a hint? Also, if Mail is able to deal with these Gmail labels, it would be nice if Mail would show every folder that a particular message is in.

That is good news! I do think somebody at Apple has talked to the Gmail team. If you look on the new Mavs features page here it alludes to this change.

Does it seem to still be indexing?