Gmail - or indeed any mail - help - macos

[Dave2002]

Really trying to get to grips with email and gmail.

My guess is that some of us (like me) have been using email for many years, and some are fairly new to it, and behind the scenes email has changed in the way it operates, or is promoted.

Some people are happy to be ignorant, and store all their email in "the" cloud - or at least one of the various online cloud offerings. That may cause some problems - but I'm not going to go into that right now.

What I really want to know is - if I use the Mail client on my macos computer - do items get moved from Gmail online storage to local storage if I create a new mailbox "On My Mac", or are they merely copied?
In particular are they deleted from the online storage?

I'm really not sure about this. If they are "merely" copied, and I want to reclaim storage in my Gmail account, then presumably I have to explicitly delete them there, but if that's done automatically, then the online storage space associated with my account should decrease after I've done the copy.

There's email I'd be happy to lose, but some I really do want to keep. I have more than enough local storage to store most of the email, but I don't want it to remain in an online location if that's not needed.

Turns out that gmail has become a lot more complicated over the years, and also there are issues trying to use different email clients to manage the email, compared with using the online web access interface.

[Pulcinella]

Do you have another device operating gmail (iPad, phone)?
You could try moving messages from your account on your Mac to the new folder you create, and see if they still appear on your other device(s) or not.

[Dave2002]

Do you have another device operating gmail (iPad, phone)?
You could try moving messages from your account on your Mac to the new folder you create, and see if they still appear on your other device(s) or not.

That is indeed an option.

I shouldn't have to try to reverse engineer everything by a sort of trial and error process in order to find out what works, and what doesn't.

If I come up with a fairly definite answer I'll post the conclusion here - but right now I still don't know.

[Pulcinella]

That is indeed an option.

I shouldn't have to try to reverse engineer everything by a sort of trial and error process in order to find out what works, and what doesn't.

If I come up with a fairly definite answer I'll post the conclusion here - but right now I still don't know.

I've used On my Mac folders and if I do a search (on my Mac) that's where they appear.
I would have thought that the terminology was pretty clear: On my Mac (not in the cloud), but I'm not as suspicious as you!

[Dave2002]

I've used On my Mac folders and if I do a search (on my Mac) that's where they appear.
I would have thought that the terminology was pretty clear: On my Mac (not in the cloud), but I'm not as suspicious as you!

I am suspicious for varioius reasons. I really don't want to try to rationalise all the emails and then discover that I've actually deleted them all.

Nowadays there can be a vast difference in the size and quantity of emails. A short but useful email might only be a few kbytes long - but might be completely swamped by large numbers of unwanted spam emails, or even large numbers of wanted emails, but emails which don't need to be left in the inbox.
I think I'm getting the hang of this now, but I still need to check that things are working as I hoped.

[Sir Velo]

There's email I'd be happy to lose, but some I really do want to keep. I have more than enough local storage to store most of the email, but I don't want it to remain in an online location if that's not needed.

Turns out that gmail has become a lot more complicated over the years, and also there are issues trying to use different email clients to manage the email, compared with using the online web access interface.

Ask them. Simple.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Really trying to get to grips with email and gmail.

My guess is that some of us (like me) have been using email for many years, and some are fairly new to it, and behind the scenes email has changed in the way it operates, or is promoted.

Some people are happy to be ignorant, and store all their email in "the" cloud - or at least one of the various online cloud offerings. That may cause some problems - but I'm not going to go into that right now.

What I really want to know is - if I use the Mail client on my macos computer - do items get moved from Gmail online storage to local storage if I create a new mailbox "On My Mac", or are they merely copied?
In particular are they deleted from the online storage?

I'm really not sure about this. If they are "merely" copied, and I want to reclaim storage in my Gmail account, then presumably I have to explicitly delete them there, but if that's done automatically, then the online storage space associated with my account should decrease after I've done the copy.

There's email I'd be happy to lose, but some I really do want to keep. I have more than enough local storage to store most of the email, but I don't want it to remain in an online location if that's not needed.

Turns out that gmail has become a lot more complicated over the years, and also there are issues trying to use different email clients to manage the email, compared with using the online web access interface.

The answer is they are merely copied . All mail on gmail webmail stores everything even (some ) deleted emails and you can restore from that. And yes if you want to reduce storage on gmail drive you have to delete them there .if these emails are important to you I would recommend keeping them on Google drive or copying onto time machine or preferably both. You need two “failsafes” as nothing is failsafe .
One thought . I have my Mac set up as a POP .account - this means emails are stored locally. My MacBook Air is set up as IMAP - this means that any emails deleted on this are ultimately deleted on the cloud depending on the time limit you set on that. It does mean that I have a very large amount of emails stored on the Mac almost certainly more than the 15gb gmail limit.

[french frank]

One thought . I have my Mac set up as a POP .account - this means emails are stored locally. My MacBook Air is set up as IMAP - this means that any emails deleted on this are ultimately deleted on the cloud depending on the time limit you set on that. It does mean that I have a very large amount of emails stored on the Mac almost certainly more than the 15gb gmail limit.

My for3.org emails are set up as POP. I noted that when I move them from the Inbox/Sent to a dedicated FoR3 folder on the iMac, they are still listed in my MacBookAir Inbox where I have to delete them. My personal btinternet.com emails which I think are IMAP, once stored in the appropriate folder or just deleted from the iMac, disappear automatically from the MacBook Air. I just assumed that moving them to a different folder deleted them from the server - but not the POP emails. Or do I just have a fundamental misunderstanding?

[I don't use gmail]

[Ein Heldenleben]

My for3.org emails are set up as POP. I noted that when I move them from the Inbox/Sent to a dedicated FoR3 folder on the iMac, they are still listed in my MacBookAir Inbox where I have to delete them. My personal btinternet.com emails which I think are IMAP, once stored in the appropriate folder or just deleted from the iMac, disappear automatically from the MacBook Air. I just assumed that moving them to a different folder deleted them from the server - but not the POP emails. Or do I just have a fundamental misunderstanding?

[I don't use gmail]

I wouldn’t have thought mail folders make much difference . I think IMAP emails can be stored locally but you need to get into the settings. I’m pretty sure that if imap emails are then deleted locally there are also deleted on the relevant Mail server but I can’t be categoric about that as I don’t store IMAP emails as that defeats the purpose of linking iPhone , iPad and MacBook Air. As I said I retain my (1Tb) iMac as a POP email backup. Were I to locally store emails on any of the mobile devices I would soon run out of space,
The reason I retain emails via POP on a iMac is that the talktalk email server once deleted five years worth.
I have never had a problem with gmail - I think it’s way more reliable.

[Dave2002]

I'm not sure about items being deleted locally if IMAP - that I'll have to check. I think this may be wrong, and that it is possible to download emails and store them locally, but I'll see - hopefully without any major problems.

One of the reasons this is of concern to me is that before and during the pandemic I was interested in US news, so subscribed to the NY Times, and the Washington Post. I have also subscribed to a number of other online newspapers, plus other mail lists.

What I am now trying is to make mailboxes in folders on my iMac for the Newspapers. In that mail folder I now have sub folders for the NY Times and the Washington Post.

It is also necessary to figure out the interfaces. Currently the newspapers come in via Gmail - and as far as I can remember - these come in via an IMAP mail link. From the discussion above I'm not sure if it is possible to have both an IMAP and a POP connection to the same mail server.
I'll perhaps come back to that later.

I use the Mac Mail client on the local machine, and also the Gmail interface accessible via a web browser. There are merits in using the Gmail interface via the web browser, as it seems that it may be possible to do things which aren't so obvious in the Mail client.
Selecting swathes of mail to delete on the remote server via the Gmail interace does seem reasonably fast - as the operations will be done back at the server end. If the same kinds of operation are done via the Mail client, the speed may depend on how the client actually sets up the operations - whether it sends a general delete instruction to the mail server, or alternatively sends a series of delete commands sequentially. It is possible that it does both, but we can't necessarily tell how. It may be possible to manage everything from the Mail client, but that relies on the synchronisation between that and the remote server being set up appropriately.

I am now more systematically putting the incoming newspaper articles into the local folders. To do this it is necessary to use the exact From email address in the search within the Mail client, then use the Move To interface to move all the selected emails to the local mailbox. This seems to work, but is not instantaneous. It clearly takes some time.

The next steps are to see if any of the mail remains on the remote server, and if there are local copies, then force the delete on the remote server. Also to check that deleting an item from the remote server does not actually also delete it from the local server - which someone upthread has commented upon.

There are people who rely on IMAP for connecting to servers as they connect with different devices - say a desktop machine, a laptop an iPad and a mobile phone. This approach of using local mailboxes won't work too well for them, as my understanding is that it will push all the data on to one device - in my case my desktop iMac.
Some more technically minded people might want to set up their own mail server, and save the incoming email on that, and then use that to serve out the individual items via IMAP or POP to each of the devices in their armoury.
I am happy enough to have most of the mail on one machine, though I could adopt a policy of not copying all the latest incoming email to local mailboxes, so that new mail items would still be available via IMAP to several different devices.

Things are starting to look hopeful - but it could all go wrong.

We'll see.