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.

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    44·
    2 days 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.