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Thunderbird and gmail aren't exactly the best of friends. Gmail's labels mean that Thunderbird often downloads multiple copies of a single mail. Anything tagged in gmail will appear in a folder related to that tag, the "all mail" folder, and possibly the "inbox" and "sent mail" folders too. Thus a mail with multiple tags could potentially be stored more than four times in a local Thunderbird cache. This can make searching difficult, and is obviously wasteful of disk space.
The best solution I have come up with is as follows. Operate a zero inbox policy (i.e. use the inbox for processing live mail only and archive everything else) which eliminates an extra copy in the inbox. Secondly, configure Thunderbird not to sync the "Sent Mail" folder - this is a bit of a pain, since I actually find it quite useful to be able to look through just the mails I've sent, but a search can duplicate this functionality. In this way, most of the duplicates are removed, and only mail with tags is stored locally more than once.
Ideally, however, I'd only like one copy of each mail to be stored locally. I am surprised Thunderbird doesn't store mail by some sort of hashing algorithm to prevent precisely this problem - but it wouldn't be compatible with the way the folders are mirrored in a local directory structure, I suppose.
Can anyone think of a better way to get Thunderbird to cache a Google mail account locally efficiently.
A 'zero inbox' policy is nothing more nor less than never leaving messages in your inbox. So normally your inbox is empty. – David Given – 2014-10-02T12:57:22.323
2This is not at all a problem between Thunderbird and gmail. It's a problem between IMAP and gmail. IMAP has no concept of tags and it has no concept of the same message existing in multiple folders. Google has no way of communicating to Thunderbird (or any other IMAP client) the fact that two messages in two folders are in fact the same message. There are only two ways around that: use a different protocol than IMAP that supports this, or use an IMAP protocol extension that supports this (if there existed one). – Celada – 2013-06-04T01:10:01.667
Please could you explain whay you call "zero inbox policy" I mean how are your settings in Thunderbird? – sebelk – 2014-03-11T16:58:25.433