Gmail important emails being archived automatically and never show up in Mac Mail Inbox

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Gmail important emails being archived automatically and never show up in Mac Mail Inbox

On a certain date, messages from one of my GMAIL accounts (home), started being labeled as being Important and did not show up in my Mac Mail inbox. I use Mac Mail to aggregate multiple email accounts, sort listserver messages into different mailboxes, store important messages, etc. The behavior I want is for all gmail to come into my inbox for processing, not some separate folder.

After spending a lot of time looking at the issue, I found:

I do see the messages if I go to GMAIL setting (web based gmail) and turn on Show In IMAP for important. An Important Inbox is created in Mac Mail under my GMAIL home account name. Another is created un Archive with a copy of each [unread] message under the GMAIL home account name under Archive.

Changing all the gmail settings did not seem to change anything. Currently, I have one tab Primary under Configure Inbox. Under Settings -> LabelsI have the following.

Under Settings - Inbox

Under Settings -> Filers and Blocked Addresses

Under Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP

With the current settings, if I have both Mac Mail and GMAIL (browser) running, a message that comes in as important does show up in the gmail inbox initially. Under Important in GMAIL, I see the Inbox label initially, but after a period of time (could be seconds or minutes), the Inbox label is removed and the message no longer appears in the Inbox.

Tried using All Mail but really same problem - incoming mail goes to All Mail and not the inbox.

Tried deleting and recreating Google Home account in Mac Mail - does not solve problem.

If I do not run Mac Mail, it appears messages stay in the GMAIL inbox and do not get removed from the inbox (that is, do not get archived). If this holds, it would appear that Mac Mail is causing Important Messages to be Archived so the inbox label is removed, which *may* explain why they never appear in the inbox. I did check my mail rules but did not see any rule that could cause this.

Posted on Jul 22, 2019 7:26 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,958 points

Jul 22, 2019 2:59 PM in response to John Heffernan

If Gmail is sorting it on the server, then it will not go into your Inbox.

Mail maps the Gmail All Mail label to the Archive mailbox.

Generally, all email comes into Gmail with both an Inbox label and an All Mail label, so you would see the message in both the Inbox and Archive folders.

When you delete a message from the Inbox in Mail, it only removes the Inbox label. Since you have it set to move the message to trash in the Gmail settings, it does not remain in the All Mail label.

I really have no idea how Mail handles the other different Labels. Gmail pretends to be IMAP for email clients, but it really isn't. Mail does not really have the ability to have the same message in two mailboxes. They seem to have tried to make it somewhat functional. I try to avoid using Gmail in Mail since it really isn't an IMAP account, it just plays one on the internet.

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Answer 2

Jul 23, 2019 3:20 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks for that info but it appears that Mac Mail is coming in (in my case with this one gmail account only) and archiving the message by taking off the inbox label. You can see it happen in web gmail. When clicked on Inbox, you see the message disappear and it remains in Important. In Important, you can see the inbox label is removed.

So not solved but what I did was show Important in iMAP in my gmail settings and read incoming gmail messages there. Annoying.

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Answer 3

Jul 23, 2019 6:03 AM in response to John Heffernan

You can see on the hard to find details link in Gmail that the Mail app is accessing Gmail just at the time the inbox label is removed and the inbox is OK (as seen in Safari/gmail) until that time. Note the problem occurs when Mac Mail is started.

Over in the gmail forums, they blame the client mail app if no filters and forwarding is set up as in my case. Seems to be the case. The weird thing is it only happens on one of my gmail accounts and even matching all settings does not fix it.

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Answer 4

Jul 23, 2019 3:21 AM in response to John Heffernan

More info. I thought maybe it was IOS mail coming in but I ruled it out by shutting off iPhone and iPad and issue still occurred.

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Answer 5

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,958 points

Jul 23, 2019 3:06 PM in response to John Heffernan

I would imagine it has to do with Gmail's silliness with the whole label translation to IMAP folders and Mail trying to do something with the multiple tags.

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Answer 6

Jul 24, 2019 6:10 AM in response to Barney-15E

Stumped so best solution right now is Show Important in IMAP in gmail settings and move the folder that is created as close as possible to Inbox in Mac Mail.

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Gmail important emails being archived automatically and never show up in Mac Mail Inbox

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