"All Mail" imported thousands of deleted emails

Hi. I recently installed EM Client. I imported my emails from Outlook but I find that the “All Mail” folder contains thousands of emails that I’ve deleted over years. I can think of two possibilities: (1) “All Mail” also contains the emails in archived .pst files; or (2) “All Mail” contains all the emails that I’ve deleted from Outlook but not from Gmail.

I don’t need all these old emails. Anyone have any idea where they’ve all come from? And how best to dispose of them? Thanks.

It is years ago since I had my last contact with Outlook- pst-files. As far as I can remember (which may have changed meanwhile but your description points into this direction) pst is a contantly growing container collecting everything. »I’ve deleted« is only the impression Outlook gives to you because where else than from the pst file should emClient recover them?

And I can remeber that importing from pst files always — regardless to the client — opens the sesame presenting you things you have long forgotten…

My last memory is, that I brewed a huge cup of coffee (or two, three,…) and went through the list with ↓ and DEL under my index fingers.

Maybe (hopefully for you!) there’s a better way, or the V8 could solve this, but I decided back then to go this way to get things done, instead of looking for a solution that may not exist (or went undiscovered to me).

If you still have access to Outlook you may have a look for something like “compress database” or “clean database” (something like that). Maybe this removes the deleted files actually. Then you can restart your import (delete existing mails, …)

Yes, All Mail is a Gmail system folder synced from the Google server. If you did not delete the messages from Gmail, they will be in that folder. That has nothing to do with your MS Outlook pst file unless MS Outlook was also syncing the All Mail folder. Maybe that was not the case though as you said the messages did not appear in MS Outlook.

BTW, don’t just go and delete everything in the All Mail folder. You will lose all your Gmail Inbox, Sent etc messages as well.