Gmail IMAP: New mail in Inbox AND "[Gmail] All Mail"

I also experience this behaviour. I think this happens due to gmail's way of storing emails. Unfortunately, it seems as if gmail does not (yet) support to subscribe or unsubscribe from special folders (This behaviour also shows in Thunderbird). So it's more a gmail related than a Mac OS Mail related problem.
Maybe someone in the gmail help center or the corresponding google group can help you: http://mail.google.com/support/

If you do find a workaround or solution, please let me know.
Regards

You can't modify Gmail's hierarchy of folders... it's fairly non-standard in the way it handles IMAP.

Note if you go to Gmail's help it explicitly tells you how to best configure Mail with their system (using specific folders for specific things). I recommend you have a read.

I did read those help documents and configured Mail accordingly.
However, since you cannot unsubscribe from specific folders, the All Mail folder will always appear in your folder list in Mail. And since Gmail stores all mails in that folder (I think due to their conversations thingy), all unread mails will also pop up there.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

This was bothering me to no end. I found this in another forum and it has worked for me. I had to share. I hope it works for you too.

In your Account Preferences, under the Advanced Tab, set the IMAP Path Prefix to: Gmail

Well, this got rid of the extra mail boxes... but it got rid of all mail boxes too. My inbox is now empty... I tried synchronizing, and when that didn't bring my messages back I just switched it back to the way it was. I'd rather have two copies of every message then to have none.

You mean set the IMAP path to "bracket"Gmail"bracket" as shown in the subject

Yes, you can certainly do this, but it will also hide all your "label" folders, meaning you only have inbox, outbox, draft, trash, all mail and starred left - not very elegant either...

The duplicate emails in "All Mail" and "Inbox" have also been bothering me.

By using "[Gmail]\Inbox" as the IMAP prefix, you only have the Inbox folder showing.

I found in macosxhints an excellent method to prevent Mail.app synchronizing the All Mail folder. It's by user "ja" and can be found here: <http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=display&format=threaded&order=ASC& pid=96614>.
Briefly, you need to open Terminal, use cd to go to $ΗΟΜΕ/Library/Mail/IMAP-youraccountname@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail] and delete (or move) the All Mail.imapmbox folder (e.g rm -rf "All Mail.imapmbox" - I assume you can also do than from the finder).
Then while still in the same directory ([Gmail]) type:
ln -s /dev/null "All Mail.imapmbox"
This creates an alias to /dev/null which is essentially a black hole. The All Mail folder in Mail.app will remain empty. There are no more duplicate messages and search works fine. I found this to be the best of the three hints mentioned in the same thread (<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200802081934189>).
George

Thanks so much to George for this tip. It works well, except that there's a small error in the pathway listed in the first step. It should be [Gmail] in brackets at the end of the line rather than Gmail without brackets.

George,

I'm hoping you might still be following this thread. I went ahead and did what you and "ja" suggested and that did solve the problem of duplicates in my "All Mail" folder. However, search is no longer working properly. I enter a search term in Mail 3.0 and nothing comes up; but when I enter the same term in the Gmail web interface, I get results. Any ideas?

Sorry, I can't tell what the problem with search might be - it works fine for me. However, I am geting a different problem in that every time I open mail.app it attempts to re-download the entire All Mail folder, which can take a very long time depending on the size of it and the connection speed. This does not affect any other operation, but it is annoying to have the progress bar running all the time.

The Gmail prefix works great but you do need to exit Mail and restart it to get the inbox back.

A

to be clear that is

Accounts > Gmail account > Advanced

Add "Gmail" to IMAP Path Prefix box

Restart Mail and you should just have the Gmail inbox and no other folders.

a