Up to this point, I have been using POP3 for my email accounts, yes I know this is awful, and I need to switch everything to IMAP as well as copy all of my emails over. I started with my Gmail accounts and have noticed that the Inbox and Sent sync, but the trash does not. It's important that I am able to keep tens of thousands of emails from my Gmail account from the past few years in case I need to reference them. When I delete an email to my Gmail account, it goes to Trash in Apple Mail on my drive, but not in Gmail. How can I fix this? Any help is very much appreciated!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Need Help with Apple Mail, IMAP, and Gmail
- Thread starter NickMcCandless
- Start date
-
- Tags
- apple mail gmail imap
- Sort by reaction score
Unfortunately, Apple Mail.app on macOS doesn't get this right - when you delete a Gmail message it goes to the trash instead of archive, and often gets stuck in the trash. iOS Mail.app doesn't have this issue - it defaults to archiving instead of deleting, which is exactly what you want. I don't know of a workaround besides using a different email app that understands Gmail better.
Are you saying that in Mail in macOS (Sierra) you can no longer designate Gmail's "Trash" folder in the menu item Mailbox>Use This Mailbox As>Trash Mailbox and set the account's "Mailbox Behaviors" to "Store deleted messages on the server"?
You don't need to designate the Gmail trash folder as "Trash" in Mail, because Mail does that for you. The "Store deleted messages on the server" option seems to be gone completely. To be perfectly honest, I never bothered to look in there after upgrading to Sierra, until you mentioned it. However, doing this doesn't change the default delete action to "Archive", which is what's needed to solve the OP's problem. Mail on macOS simply won't do this for some odd reason.