Google Workspace limits the amount of bandwidth for syncing accounts. Exceeding these limits through sync can temporarily suspend an account. See Bandwidth limits for accounts.
Anyway. I feel like we’re just going in circles here so unless there is a solution I don’t really have anything more to say. Just to sum up:
Google has sync limits. It just does. And it isn’t going to change that because someone asks it to.
eM Client doesn’t technically need to sync “All Mail” but it does.
eM Client is the lone client of the four that I use daily that is showing an unread message count on that folder.
Trying everything that’s been suggested in this thread, short of removing and re-adding that gmail account, has failed to fix the problem. I appreciate the replies and suggestions but I can’t remove/re-add now.
A paid for and licensed version Pro version of eM Client (which as such things go is not cheap) keeps doing things like this. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops (like locally backing up, which I’m not convinced would work anyway) to keep it working right. It’s not Google’s fault that eM Client, not infrequently, does stuff that requires either rebuilding its folders from in-app, from the commandline, or removing and re-adding accounts. gmail is working as expected, eM Client is not.
With a Gmail account, all your messages are stored in a single folder. All Mail. There are no other folders on the server. Those messages in All Mail have labels that sort them into virtual folders you see as Inbox, Sent, etc. but they are all just in a single folder.
It is a simple fix. But until you remove and re-add the account, this database issue will not be resolved.
Thanks. I understand all that. I know gmail works but I also know how IMAP works. Yes, that is how it works internally within gmail and its backend. But… When using IMAP to access gmail, gmail maps its labels to IMAP folders/mailboxes (I’m going to call them folders since calling them mailboxes tends to confuses people). So, for example, the Inbox label becomes an IMAP folder, the Sent label becomes an IMAP folder, each custom label you create becomes an IMAP folder and the client interacts with gmail via standard IMAP commands. gmail then handles mapping to/from labels in interfacing with its native backend so the way it is actually storing things, the “All Mail”/labels thing, is abstracted to standard IMAP. “All Mail” is not needed (and never has been ) when interfacing with gmail as an IMAP client.
I, and everyone I know, has been using gmail this way, i.e. without “All Mail” being “made visible in IMAP” since gmail started supporting IMAP in 2007. It’s always worked and still does. If it didn’t IMAP clients couldn’t use standard IMAP with gmail because it wouldn’t work right.
Understood. But for now, as I’ve explained above, it’s just gonna have to wait. And on the flip side: eM Client needs to fix this (and others similar issues I’ve experienced) if it’s gonna call itself “Pro” and charge accordingly. When I bought it I expected enterprise level reliability but have not experienced that. All the fancy stuff is nice but basic stuff like this needs to “just work”.
Removing the account and adding it back again will fix it.
The way Gmail works is that all your messages are stored in that single folder. Then they have labels (not mailboxes) to sort them into virtual folders.
If you don’t sync the All Mail folder, you will end up losing some of your messages. For example if you archive a message in Gmail, either in an app or in the webmail interface, it exists only in All Mail but it has no labels. So without syncing All Mail, you lose that message in the application.
And messages that have more than one label exist in All Mail as a single message with multiple labels. So syncing only the labels in some instances means using extra bandwidth to sync the same single message more than once. And managing multiple copies of a single message comes with its own problems.
Really, the easiest, most efficient and reliable way to sync the mailbox is to sync a single folder from the server - All Mail.
But it is not standard IMAP and other clients get by just fine without doing that. All I am saying is that eM Client has made the decision to interface with gmail via gmail’s native interface and that interface only. eM Client explicitly disallows IMAP access to gmail, even though it works. There is no reason that I can see for doing that. Since both gmail and eM Client support IMAP just fine, if I want to connect to gmail via IMAP I should be allowed to do that (put up a warning or something if you want but let me do it)…
…And worse, eM CLient’s gmail-specific interface seems to be broken - as evidenced by the problem I detailed in my OP (and other similar problems that I came across in this forum while researching before I posted that OP). Fix all those and I’ll stop complaining. I mean, in the time I’ve been using eM CLient I’ve already had to do this several times (which is why I know how much of a problem having to do it is). Once I never see “delete and re-add the account” or “rebuild the folder” (or whatever) and the like as solutions to problems that shouldn’t exist in a mature commercial product that’s been around for more than a decade I’ll be happy.
If seems that it is a database issue, so has nothing to do with syncing the account. Removing the account and adding it back again will fix it, as it will recreate the database for that account.
Except that they don’t show all your messages. I gave an example and explained above about the Gmail archive function. If you don’t sync All Mail, you don’t have access to the archived messages. Similarly, if you accidentally remove the tags on a message, it still exists in the only folder All Mail, but you won’t see it in the application.
One reason too why its also good to sync All Mail apart from what @Gary already advised above.
eg: If you “copy or move” emails from say the Gmail Inbox to other Gmail labels and you have an internet hiccup or delay in that process, sometimes the email label then doesn’t add on to the receiving label end, so your emails are then no longer in the Inbox label or the Receiving label. This is rare, but has happened to myself and other friends on the odd occasions, due to we use Wifi networks.
You then can go to All Mail and add the label back on by either copying or moving it again from All Mail, or by just manually adding the tag. So without All Mail synced locally there would be no way to fix that.