[MlMt] Handling “[Gmail]/All Mail” gracefully

[Daniel Mann]

On 29 Oct 2013, at 6:43, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> theoretically I think it would work to assign All Mail to be the 
> Archive mailbox (setting “Archive” as Mailbox Type for 
> “[Gmail]/All Mail” mailbox). Feedback is welcome :-)

I have now tested this for a couple of days using 1.7 (3790). The change 
was simple: subscribe to the All Mail "folder" from Gmail, then set the 
[Gmail]/All Mail folder as the Archive folder.

In my case this folder is fairly heavily used, with over 30K unique 
messages (reported by Gmail as ~16K conversations). I did temporarily 
turn off conversation view in Gmail to confirm that the number of 
messages matched: 30,218.

Archiving messages from INBOX to the [Gmail]/All Mail folder seems to 
work fine. I do notice an odd bit of display behavior: the message 
disappears from the INBOX folder, then reappears in red momentarily, 
then disappears again. It's a bit distracting, but doesn't seem to cause 
any problems. Still, I thought you might like to hear about it.

Again in my case, I use the Gmail web interface quite a bit. Many of the 
customers I work with daily use large corporate Exchange deployments. 
These customers tend to work in groups, and will Cc: several people and 
lists on message threads. They also top-post everything, use rich text 
formatting, and include the entire ever-growing message thread in each 
reply. In order to cater to their preferences (yes, they protest when I 
deviate), I often use Gmail to reply to these messages in similar 
fashion, retaining their formatting.

Aside from that, I just have this corpus of historical mail resting in 
Gmail's All Mail folder from years of living the Gmail lifestyle. My 
total number of folders (labels) is pretty small; I actively use only 
Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Archive (All Mail), plus Action, Review, and 
Waiting labels. These all translate nicely to IMAP folders, so having 
[Gmail]/All Mail set as my Archive folder in MailMate keeps everything 
nice and tidy.

Regards,

-Daniel