Problem Statement

I’m in the process of de-googling, and I’m about 60% there, but I still need gmail for the things that I cannot or have not yet migrated.

I’ve also recently experimented w/ the Thunderbird app for both Linux and Android, and it’s okay. One thing that really irritates me is the fact that when I import my emails from gmail, all my labels are handled as folders in Thunderbird. This is an issue b/c I have rules to help organize incoming email by assigning one or more labels. I believe Thunderbird has the concept of tags, but by default Thunderbird routes gmail labels to folders instead of tags.

Question

Is there a mail client on Linux (and Android) that handles labels from gmail as tags instead of folders? Alternatively, is there a setting in Thunderbird that will use tags instead of labels that I’m just not aware of?

I’ve tried searching DDG, but came up with nothing useful beyond other posts on other social media websites asking similar questions.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    10·
    13 hours ago

    Labels/Tags are a product feature, not part of email standards. Meaning: it’s not a thing when looking at the raw mail server data.

    Each product handles this in their own way, and the tool being used to export your mail from one host/product to another would be what is handling that, if at all. Gmail probably just uses folders because that is part of the structure a mail server would have.

    I believe Proton’s import tools handles this correctly from Gmail using both labels as folders and preserving tags, but I believe Thunderbird just puts them in folders as is standard.

    You can double check by looking at the raw data exported from any mail service. You could probably easily write a quick script to handle getting tag info and applying it yourself, though it could be quite slow.