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.
i don’t use rules but fairmail has an option about gmail labels in rules ☞ https://m66b.github.io/FairEmail/#faq71
I’ve been using fairmail for some years. I’m on tuta now but i may end up getting a mailbox.org just to have fairmail as my main mailer again
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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.
Maybe those would help (although using those would require changing how you do emails and it’s not a solution for Android):
- offlineimap in case you need something to fetch your IMAP emails.
- gmailieer is a tool which uses Gmail API to fetch emails.
- notmuch is a tool which indexes your email. You can assign whatever labels you want and rather than folders it uses tags.
- For notmuch you then need a front-end which can display the emails. I use Emacs for that. And since notmuch uses tags, you can then create whatever ‘folders’ by making saved searches.
It’s unfortunately how gmail handles IMAP. I don’t think any clients handle that differently
