Wednesday 15 September 2010

Fixing the 'Sent Mail' Boxes

The wife now sends mail from Thunderbird, the iphone natively, from the iphone safari browser google application and the full google website.  When she does this the 'sent' mail ends up scattered all over.  Here's how I fixed it so that all the sent mail went to the same place:


  1. First of all I went onto the gmail website, found all the sent-like folder and amalgamated them all into one. I had
    • [imap]/Sent
    • [INBOX]/Sent
    • [INBOX]/Sent Items
    • [INBOX]/sent-mail
  2. Sent a test mail from each location to find out where it went
    • The full google website went to the correct google sent folder, unsurprisingly!
    • Thunderbird went to the google sent folder and to [imap]/Sent.  I changed this to [Google Mail]/Sent Mail, which fixed the problem of the duplicate
    • The iphone native app put sent in just the google folder
    • The iphone google app also put the email in the google folder
  3. Check that all the clients look at the correct place to find the sent mail
    • The google full and iphone apps saw the sent mail correctly
    • The iphone native app was getting confusing with the old sent-like labels.  I deleted the labels in gmail and then it all made much more sense
    • Thunderbird didn't really have a good solution.  The 'Sent Mail' was under the [Google Mail] folder in the tree which was a little confusing