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

4 comments:

Dave Potts said...

Well it was never going to be that easy. Here's the snag list:

(1) The web mail client doesn't seem to handle mailto: links with a subject parameter on Firefox

(2) The outgoing email id in a Gmail account on the iphone isn't set correctly

(3) I seem to have found a bug in Thunderbird 3.0.7. where it is not displaying the same email contents as on the webmail in box

I'll do them one at a time in other comments.

Dave Potts said...

(1) mailto: links with a subject parameter on Firefox 3.5.12

My wife uses Yahoo groups which in html digest mode have mailto: links with an ....?Subject=+.... URL in them. Clicking the link in gmail's web interface brings up a new window in reply, but doesn't put the subject line in. Chrome 6.0.472.55 has the same problem.

I tried the instructions for the options in Firefox, but that didn't handle the subject parameter.

Then I spotted that it worked on my Gmail account using Chrome. The difference between the accounts is that while we're on the same Yahoo Groups list I don't use the daily digest setting. It turns out that the mailto: URL is different in the daily digest versus the simple email. The digest has an extra '+' sign after the 'subject=' portion of the URL. Argh!

Dave Potts said...

(2) Outgoing email id on the iphone

The solution to this one was not to use the 'Gmail' button on the iphone but to set up Gmail as an IMAP server manually. That way you could fill in the email address as the correct out-going address and then everything worked just fine

Dave Potts said...

(3) Thunderbird Problems

The issue was that having replied to an email (which bounced) the reply appeared in the inbox rather than the original email message. I rebuilt the index on the folder but that didn't help.

Following the release notes from Mozilla I recreated the profile. That solved the problem, if not the sense of frustration.