Archives vs All Mail

[Clued2it]

I'm rather confused about Thunderbird Archives and the All Mail folder with Gmail accounts.

In the All Folders view I see an All Mail folder where all email is stored. I can see the same data in the Archives folder if I change the view to Unified Folders. The emails that I see in both these views include a number of emails that I'm sure that I deleted when they were first received. Yet they appear in these two lists. Why is this so?

My account settings in Thunderbird are Message archives enabled and the location is "Other" All Mail on <myusername>@gmail.com.

Are the All Mail and Archives folders the same one or two different folders on my computer?

[tanstaafl]

They're different. All Mail contains a copy of all of the accounts mail. Anything in Archives is still in a ordinary mail folder, its just organized according to some conventions and has some helper functions associated with it. But nothing you couldn't do manually.

if you use a IMAP account "when I delete a message" can be set to "just mark it as deleted". That will set a IMAP deleted flag on the message which causes a line to be drawn though it in the folder listing, but its still visible/readable, and not moved to Trash.

Gmail uses labels which the IMAP server interprets as folders. So a message can be in multiple folders at the same time, if it has multiple labels. A IMAP deleted flag is treated as a label.

Your archives don't have to be in the same account. You could use any folder in any account.

[Clued2it]

Thank you for the information. I notice now that Archives is an optional setting.