Problem Statement

I’m in the process of de-googling, and I’m about 60% there, but I still need gmail for the things that I cannot or have not yet migrated.

I’ve also recently experimented w/ the Thunderbird app for both Linux and Android, and it’s okay. One thing that really irritates me is the fact that when I import my emails from gmail, all my labels are handled as folders in Thunderbird. This is an issue b/c I have rules to help organize incoming email by assigning one or more labels. I believe Thunderbird has the concept of tags, but by default Thunderbird routes gmail labels to folders instead of tags.

Question

Is there a mail client on Linux (and Android) that handles labels from gmail as tags instead of folders? Alternatively, is there a setting in Thunderbird that will use tags instead of labels that I’m just not aware of?

I’ve tried searching DDG, but came up with nothing useful beyond other posts on other social media websites asking similar questions.

  • Ardens@lemmy.ml
    1·
    17 hours ago

    I don’t know how many mails you have. But if that is what you want, then do the work… Import it into Thunderbird, select all mails in a folder, give them a tag, and move them where you want them. It might take a little time, but my guess is, that it will take way shorter time, than trying to find different programs to help you do it your way.

    Oh, and maybe you could come up with a different system, than that google put on you… Just a thought here.

    • curious_dolphin@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      Agreed, this is where I’m at as well.

      What I’ve had in place for the last decade or more made sense to me once upon a time, but it’s over engineered and of limited usefulness.

      Despite the potential technical solutions offered in other comments, I’ve resolved to go through and clean up my email history, including deleting stuff I no longer need and reconfiguring how I assign labels to incoming messages in gmail in order to make sense to my current self and play nice with the folder system, which seems to be more industry standard anyway.

      • Ardens@lemmy.ml
        1·
        8 hours ago

        I can only applaud it. And a nice cleanup once every decade feels good too. :-)

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    181·
    2 days ago

    Labels/Tags are a product feature, not part of email standards. Meaning: it’s not a thing when looking at the raw mail server data.

    Each product handles this in their own way, and the tool being used to export your mail from one host/product to another would be what is handling that, if at all. Gmail probably just uses folders because that is part of the structure a mail server would have.

    I believe Proton’s import tools handles this correctly from Gmail using both labels as folders and preserving tags, but I believe Thunderbird just puts them in folders as is standard.

    You can double check by looking at the raw data exported from any mail service. You could probably easily write a quick script to handle getting tag info and applying it yourself, though it could be quite slow.

    • curious_dolphin@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      Labels/Tags are a product feature, not part of email standards. Meaning: it’s not a thing when looking at the raw mail server data.

      Thanks for the info. This helps me understand why things are the way that they are. It has me rethinking the use of tags altogether and leaning more toward reviewing my labels in gmail so I can tweak the ones that are still useful and remove any that are obsolete.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        1·
        7 hours ago

        That’s a solid plan.

        If you want a deeper dive, just make some stuff in Thunderbird, then export and view it. It’ll give you a bit of a look into how email standards servers organize data.

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    It’s unfortunately how gmail handles IMAP. I don’t think any clients handle that differently

  • mina86@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Maybe those would help (although using those would require changing how you do emails and it’s not a solution for Android):

    • offlineimap in case you need something to fetch your IMAP emails.
    • gmailieer is a tool which uses Gmail API to fetch emails.
    • notmuch is a tool which indexes your email. You can assign whatever labels you want and rather than folders it uses tags.
    • For notmuch you then need a front-end which can display the emails. I use Emacs for that. And since notmuch uses tags, you can then create whatever ‘folders’ by making saved searches.
  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    44·
    1 day ago

    I went þrough þis years ago. My ultimate solution was offlineimap and notmuch. Þere are several clients which can work wiþ notmuch, but my favorites are TUI tools, which it sounds like may not be your bag.

    About a year ago I switched to mbsync, and more recently to imapgoose, which does bidirectional sync’ing, differential updates, and push notifications.

    Regardless of how you sync, notmuch is þe secret sauce, as it performs full text indexing and tagging. Þe downside is þat þere’s no good solution for syncing notmuch DBs across servers, which means tagging is bound to a single computer; and notmuch indexes can get enormous - since þey’re binary databases, diffing and keeping versions is non-trivial. However, it’s about as close a solution as you can get to þe far superior gmail “tagging” and search-based email organization approach.

    An alternative is mairix. It’s far faster at indexing þan notmuch and þe index is smaller, but it’s far less powerful. I actually use þem in conjunction - notmuch on my PC and mairix on þe mail server, because þey boþ understand email IDs - so you can e.g. search for “tag:spam” on a PC wiþ notmuch and dump email IDs, þen pipe þose to þe server and look þem up wiþ mairix and run “dspam learn” on þem. It’s all a bit convoluted, but once you get it set up, a couple short shell scripts is enough to manage email using þe far superior paradigm of tags.