Re: Working with gmail

[Gesh <ge...@ge...>]

26.11.2025 12:50:02 Oswald Buddenhagen <osw...@gm...>:

> On Thu, Nov 06, 2025 at 02:43:55AM +0200, Gesh wrote:
>>> Error: channel gesh-iobox: near side box [Gmail]/Sent Mail cannot be opened.
>> Investigating suggests I need to escape the name of the near-side box by writing
>> it as
>>> Channel gesh-iobox-sent
>>> Far :gesh-remote:"[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
>>> Near :gesh-local:"\\[Gmail\\]/Sent Mail"
>>>
> huh ... where did you get that from?

Experimenting with various syntaxes, this was the only one that didn't throw errors - unclear why, though.

>> A tangential bug I had here is that for some reason, syncing messages meant that a bunch of them had their delivery times reset *on the server end*,
>>
> i suppose this would happen if the messages are moved between boxes client-side (and thus re-delivered to gmail's unified inbox).

It's been a while, I've forgotten if this was also in my standard addresses, but I made the mistake of trying to use this to mirror emails to a backup account which was already getting emails by bouncing them. I'm unsure if that was well-advised.

>> An alternative concept would be to patch mbsync so it stores/updates IMAP extension attributes. Eg for Gmail[1], a configuration such as
>>> IMAPAccount ...
>>> StoreAttr X-GM-MSGID X-GM-THRID X-GM-LABELS
>>> UpdateAttr X-GM-LABELS
>>
> i think it's a bit "optimistic" that one could just name random attributes and expect them to be handled usefully without isync knowing their semantics.
> anyway, there is a long-standing todo item to support imap keywords.

OK, so how do you approach the situation that
- gmail duplicates emails across folders to simulate multi-labeling
- in particular, it has a catchall folder containing all mail
- I use both a phone and a computer, so any relabelling needs to be propagated back serverside so the phone picks it up

I _guess_ I could configure notmuch to ignore the all-mail folder for day-to-day, then double check from time to time that I'm not losing any mail there, and otherwise just use folders as folders?

>> Finally finally, I'm not sure I 100% understand the guidance re trashing/expunging and its interaction with Gmail --
>
>> do I understand correctly that the default behaviour is for the Gmail server to automatically delete email once it's vanished from all labels,
>>
> dunno. i don't actively use gmail, and haven't looked at the settings for a few years.
>
>> preventing batch processing,
>>
> no idea what you mean here.
>
>> and that the recommended behavior instead is to set it to move messages to Trash once their final copy is expunged?
>>
> gmail may have a setting to trash on expunge. using that would be a good choice, indeed.

I'm asking for clarification as to the first paragraph of the recommendations - not clear on what the default is and what should be changed.

Thanks!
Gesh