Thunderbird – Gmail Polling issue

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Hello,

I have a question about using Thunderbird with my gmail email account, and how TB polls gmail for new mail.

My problem – if I send an email thought gmail’s web page using my laptop, or using my phone, when I poll for new mail in TB – the sent mail I created is downloaded along with all of the new email – but it shows in the Inbox as a received email even though it is actually a sent mail. I believe this is because TB polls the All Mail mailbox on gmail – and that sent message is downloaded along with the other incoming email.

This doesn’t happen if I create an email in TB and send it through the gmail server. It isn’t included in the All Mail mailbox – it can be found in the sent mail, and doesn’t download as new mail.

My question – is there a way to tell Thunderbird to poll the gmail Inbox, not the All Mail folder when checking for new email?

Or is there a way to tell Gmail to put those types of sent messages in Sent – not All Mail?

Thanks!!

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Are you subscribed to the Sent mail folder? If you don’t know, then right-click on your GMail account in the folder panel and select “Subscribe…” from the pop-up menu.

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LHiggins

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Check the settings on gmail’s web page to see where it puts sent mail.

cheers, Paul

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LHiggins

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I use an email client called Pegasus Mail that does the same thing.  In my case, mail retrieval is by POP3.

I have not been able to figure out how to get copies of messages sent from the Gmail web interface to not be dowloaded as a new message.  When viewing the ‘Inbox’ on the Gmail web interface, the sent message copies appear in the “Everything else” section as well as in All Mail which is where I believe POP3 retrieves new messages.

 

 

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LHiggins

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Thanks for all of the replies. I checked everything I could in both Gmail and TB, and I can’t see anywhere to either tell where Gmail puts sent mail or to somehow subscribe to a folder. This is a POP3 account in TB and the subscribe option – and others – are greyed out.

Perhaps it is something with using POP3 as Peobody said?

And just to be clear – this only happens when I send an email from my phone or from the laptop using Gmail. In that case – the sent mail IS sent, but it appears in All Mail in Gmail, not sent – and I can’t move it from All Mail without just deleting it.

Then when I poll Gmail for new email – it downloads that sent message along with all of the new incoming mail – so it seems to me an issue with TB polling All Mail instead of Inbox when it gets mail from Gmail – but I can’t see any way to change or even ID that.

Guess I’ll post a question in the Mozilla forum too and see if there is any way to fix it on the Gmail side.

Thanks again – more of an annoyance that anything else.

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Sorry, I assumed that your GMail account in Thunderbird was configured as IMAP. Yeah, I think this is an issue with POP3. The POP3 protocol only supports access to Inbox on the server, so Thunderbird can’t directly access anything other than Inbox.

In Thunderbird, how is the account configured to handle Sent mail? In Account Settings>Copies & Folders, is TB perhaps saving a copy of sent mail locally?

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LHiggins

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Thanks!

Yes, it does seem to be a POP3 issue. In TB, sent mail is saved in sent – but it seems that there is also some issue with Gmail and how it is saving messages, too.

I’m going to do a few more test emails and post back later with exactly where emails seem to be saved and how they are downloaded.

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I can tell you that a copy of email I send from Pegasus Mail gets saved in the Everything else area of the inbox but POP3 does not download those, only the ones I send from the Gmail web interface get downloaded.  I look forward to hearing whether TB is doing the same thing.

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LHiggins

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I posted this question at the Gmail forum, and it seems that the answer is that it does have something to do with POP3. When using POP3, all mail is downloaded to the Inbox of an email client – even if it is mail that was sent to someone else using the Gmail web interface on a computer or on a phone.

Part of the reply from one of their experts is:

What you are seeing is normal, and is meant to allow you to synchronize the entire conversation offline.  Messages submitted through the Gmail SMTP server are marked as “already downloaded”, so they are not downloaded again, but message submitted through web services, like the web or mobile Gmail apps, are marked as “not downloaded”, so you can get a copy in your POP client.

He advised that the only way to avoid this is to set up a filter but I’m not sure how to create one that deals with just certain sent messages.

I don’t have an Everything else folder in TB. I will do a few more tests to possibly play around with filters, but I think this is just the way it is. Using an email client sends messages through the SMPT server, so those don’t get marked as already downloaded, so they don’t download the way the ones sent directly.

More later…

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OK – after trying a few different ideas – I think I have come to the conclusion that this is just a quirk of using POP3 with Gmail. I tried sending emails from both the Gmail web page and from the Gmail app on my phone – and in both cases, the mail shows up in the All Mail and Sent Folders at Gmail, and IS downloaded into TB’s Inbox as new mail.

Mail that is sent from TB itself is found in the Sent folder in both TB and on the Gmail site – but it is not downloaded again into the Inbox – having been sent through the SMTP server at Gmail.

I also tried to make a filter in TB to move those into Sent – that is sort of a work around, I guess.

I also found that once I sent an email from Gmail either online or from my phone, I can delete it from the All Mail folder there, and then there is nothing to download. Drawback is that there is also no record of that email being sent.

So…I guess it is an annoyance and one that can’t really be “fixed” – as the fellow at Gmail said, “…POP messages are <i>always</i> downloaded to the Inbox and Gmail has no control over that.”

Since I am not going to switch to IMAP, I guess I’ll just need to live with it. At least I understand why it is happening.

 

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Filter for incoming mail from Gmail?:

If “from” field is your ID/email address, Move to “Sent” folder.
Would that work, IF the settings are there.

In the past, if you wanted a record of your “sent’ email (to verify something), the sent mail was only on the device or website it was sent from. This way, you have a complete record (even if it’s a hassle.

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LHiggins

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PKCano wrote:

If “from” field is your ID/email address, Move to “Sent” folder. Would that work, IF the settings are there.

Yes, that filter does work, thanks, and will be fine for the most part. Occasionally I email something from one computer to  the other and ideally would like that to be in the inbox – maybe an article or something I want my husband to see on his laptop. That will also get filtered into sent, but that only happens occasionally, so probably not a big deal!

And I do like to keep a copy of things locally, so having them all in TB is best – though yes, can be a hassle at times.

Thanks for the help!

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