Clean Up Your Gmail folders in Your Mail

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May 23, 2011 / Updated: May 23, 2011 / Lena Shore
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Gmail is great. It works great with IMAP as well as your personal accounts and at handling your domain mail. However, it doesn’t always play nice with the Mail.app.

It works, but the default settings insist on making a new menu section on the left hand side of your screen. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have all of my mailboxes incorporated into my normal mailboxes so I don’t have a bunch of separate ones to keep up with. There are also some other reported inconsistencies.

The quick setting adjustments below will fix all kinds of little inconsistencies and make your mail work better for you. It will keep your inbox and sidebar nice and clean.

Adjust Gmail

  1. Log into your Gmail account’s web interface.
  2. Go to the Mail Settings area (as of this publishing you get to it by clicking the small gear icon in the upper right of the screen).
  3. Go to the “Labs” tab. Find and enable “Advanced IMAP Controls”.
  4. “Save Changes”
  5. Go to “Labels” and make these two new labels (FYI – your Mail.app recognizes labels as folders):
    • IMAP/Sent
    • IMAP/Trash

Adjust Mail

  1. Launch Mail on your computer.
  2. Go to your Account Preferences and select the related gmail account.
  3. Select the “Mailbox Behaviors” tab.
  4. Uncheck “Store draft messages on the server”.
  5. Check “Store sent messages on the server” and select your deletion interval.
  6. Uncheck “Store junk messages on the server”.
  7. Check “Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox.”
  8. Check “Store deleted messages on the server” and select your deletion interval.
  9. Go to the “Advanced” tab.
  10. Set IMAP Path Prefix: IMAP (this is going to match the labels we created earlier on Gmail).
  11. You can close your “Accounts” window now. Save when prompted.
  12. In the sidebar, highlight IMAP/Sent folder and select Mailbox –> Use This Mailbox For –> Sent.
  13. In the sidebar, highlight IMAP/Trash and select Mailbox –> Use This Mailbox For –> Trash.
  14. Restart your Mail.app.

 

 

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