Big Sur - Mail not archiving but sending to Bin regardless of setting

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Big Sur - Mail not archiving but sending to Bin regardless of setting

Hi all,

I've put off using the Apple Mail client for years as I can't seem to get the "archive as delete" feature or anything similar working.

I want to be able to 'delete' (press backspace) an email and for it go to my Gmail All Mail folder. I do not delete emails but rather send everything to All Mail out of my inbox once I'm finished.

I have tried changing the "Move Discarded Messages into:" setting, but it does not seem to change where messages end up - everything when deleted goes to the Bin regardless of if its set to Archive or Bin

In Mailbox behaviours, I cannot select the All Mail (/Archive) folder as the Bin folder as it is not listed.

Any advice?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Jan 4, 2021 9:53 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

grinned2death Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 7, 2021 9:01 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks for this Barney.

I didn't realise that Google used an odd form of IMAP/POP so this probably explains why it doesn't play that nicely.

I think Apple has fixed their systems to move deleted emails to the Bin (rather than just removing an Inbox label). If they hadn't it would actually work how I want! I appreciate that Google is using an odd format here, and it's not really up to Apple to make it work, but I figured that as Gmail is pretty mainstream they may have added a workaround (such as they have in the past).

For anyone else that's looking for an answer to this question - I've assigned a custom keyboard shortcut to act as Archive and use this rather than delete. You can find this by going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Specific and then adding one for Mail.

If anyone else can answer my question though and make this work like it should, I'd be grateful.

Thanks

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

117,220 points

Jan 4, 2021 4:56 PM in response to grinned2death

You don’t have to send anything to All Mail. Goolag already does that automatically so they can always harvest your information.

Messages in Gmail are tagged with Labels. Messages can hav more than one Label. When a message arrives, it gets an Inbox Label and an All Mail Label. When you delete the message from the inbox, only the Inbox label is removed. The All Mail label remains.

You can configure Gmail to delete from all Labels when you delete a message, so if you are seeing messages deleted from both, maybe you enabled that. Could be that Apple fixed their implementation to actually delete when you delete, but I don’t know.

Given all that, Gmail is neither IMAP nor POP, despite claiming to play one of those on the Internet. Trying to access that obscure structure in an IMAP email client will only work if that client actually supports all the goofy features of Gmail. Use the web portal. It was designed for all the goofiness.

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Big Sur - Mail not archiving but sending to Bin regardless of setting

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