Archiving gmail emails removes labels(categories) from some emails.

Reproduce:- do an archive on a gmail account, with all emails currently categorized into other “folders” (note, this makes it look as though they are duplicated between allMail and those other folders, just because of how gmail labels work)  AllMail will of course include everything before archiving, but all emails should also show an alternative category/folder/label.

Desired results:

  • Every categorized mail *stays* categorized after archiving.  I.e. in the archived results, the allMail folder should be empty/not exist, and all emails archived off should be in their respective category folders.

Actual results:

  • Some emails stay categorized.  Others loose their categorization and simply appear under “All Mail”.  If before archiving every email was already categorized, AllMail should always be empty after archiving.  However, I’m frequently getting 100s of emails appear in AllMail after categorizing.

It appears that this is caused as an undesired side-effect of some unintended consequences:

  • gmails archiving settings appear to remove labels as part of their archiving functionality.
  • a race condition between whether eMclient archives the email before or after the label(category) has been removed on the gmail server side.
  • a coupling between gmail “archiving” concept and eM client archiving concept, even though they are not the same thing. eM client archiving as I understand it is supposed to be an offline record of the emails that remains even if/after the gmail records are deleted/cleaned up.

Note:

  • In (online) gmail, archiving seems to remove the labels on their side.  the emails are still in the account, they just have removed the labels.
  • Use a large volume of emails, not just a handful.  When using ~10 emails, I never saw it happen, making me think it is a race condition.

Ideally, I’d like to see something where the archiving was a two-step operation to remove this possibility of (meta) data loss.  (meta data = the labels added in gmail / treated as categories in emClient)- e.g.

  • on an individual email or batch of emails
  • Step1 - eM client archives the email(s) by saving to the offline/local archive folders, with categories(labels) as defined in the accounts
  • Step 2 - blocked until Step 1 completes - Send “archiving” command to gmail to have the archive performed on their server side too.

Thankyou for listening!

Hello,
just to confirm some of your points:
the Archive button in eM Client indeed mimics the Gmail server behaviour - remove the labels and keep the message in All Mail folder.
Automatic Archiving is a function to remove messages from your server and save them locally in your eM Client database.

If you prefer keeping your messages on the server for your gmail account, I suggest not using the Automatic archive feature.

Since this is an idea post our developers can still see and consider if the feature as your describe it can be implemented.
Thank you for your feedback.

Regards,
Olivia

Thankyou Olivia,

Ok, (finally) I have been able to think of another way to describe this to simplify my request.

I DO like eM client auto-archiving, and want to keep/use this functionality:

  • offline store of emails older than (Benefit: don’t have to manually go through all my folders copying to offline archive only the specific dates.)
    - eM client database integration of local archive
    - offline folders mimic the online folders (categories by gmail is the overloaded terminology here)
    – ie. if the online folder is called “critical_tax”, then after archiving my emails should still be in a (offline/local) folder called “critical_tax”.
    – This is the part that currently doesn’t work, since a side effect of gmail archiving which is being triggered by your functionality is to remove the labels/categories, therefore destroying the meta-data.

    I DON’T like gmail archiving feature. It is effectively useless to me, and I couldn’t care less what happens on the gmail servers as a result of the eM client local save. I can manage manually myself, or I can just leave whatever the default is. (However, again, anything that removes my meta-data categories/labels is unhelpful if it means that data is lost in my offline/eM client folders.)

    The quickest workaround I could think of in the software is to have the auto-archiving switched off on gmails side with a configurable flag in settings for different user preferences. The next best would be ensuring no race-condition… i.e. allow the local archive in eM client to fully complete BEFORE triggering gmails archiving API. (I find it hard to believe that other customers/users would actually want to lose their categories when archiving locally… but perhaps that is your challenge here?)

    Is there another feature I should be using for the above requirement, or is this simply not currently available in eMClient?

    Thankyou for your patience piecing through my question to help me understand this better! (And hopefully develop your eM client more optimally.)

    Thankyou!

    Kind regards,
    Rachel

Ps: according to this gmail answer here, gmail shouldn’t remove any labels (except inbox) when archiving.  Is this actually a gmail bug?  https://www.quora.com/What-are-good-ways-to-archive-emails-in-Gmail-without-removing-label