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I have one Gmail grey folder in Mail. What is it doing there? Please help

I tried everything I guess. I have 2 accounts on Mail. The .Me account and Gmail. For some reason, A Gmail grey folder appeared at the botton of my other rules folders.

So I receive in duplicate. One thing, I have a YouTube channel, and my mail there use to be the .ME, now I had to associate my Gmail account to my Youtube account.

Could it be from this?
Any idea?
Many Thanks

iMac 20" 2.66Ghz 4Gb Ram MacBook 2.2 2Gb Ram, Mac OS X (10.6.6), Lacie Firewire 160Gb Lacie 500Gb

Posted on Mar 3, 2011 10:55 AM

Reply
11 replies

Mar 3, 2011 11:11 AM in response to juca2929

If you Control-click on the Inbox of the Gmail (or any mailbox belonging to it) I think you will see the folders that the grey (I would say White) folder. All folders residing on the IMAP server are listed in the Sidebar below those you create as On My Mac. The folders I have listed within the grey folder under the section Icon for the Gmail account have been created by Gmail, and not otherwise. There are ways to exclude some Gmail folders from being seen in Mail, btw.

All my IMAP accounts have on-server folders listed, but only Gmail has them organized within a while folder.

Ernie

Mar 3, 2011 1:18 PM in response to Ernie Stamper

Hi, thanks, yes there's an arrow that opens the grey Gmail folder. Inside that are: All Mail, Sent Mail, Drafts, etc. folders all in blue.

I'm a little confused, it seems an hard issue after all.
I used to have (and still do) on the Top Left sidebar this:

Inbox (this one has an arrow to hide the Mailboxes)
Moblile Me
Gmail

I still do, but then at the botton the Grey folder appeared somehow.
I wish I could put here a screenshot...

I cannot delete that folder, it says "Failure" and I've deleted the account and added it again several times with no success.

So I'm stuck, but thanks for you're help 🙂

Mar 3, 2011 1:34 PM in response to juca2929

I understand what you are seeing completely, so no need for screenshot. Those items revealed are created by connection to the Gmail server in IMAP protocol. If you ever accessed Gmail as POP, then they would not have been there. The location in the Sidebar is the standard location for such folders residing on an IMAP server. Because they are a product of the action of the server, and standard to Gmail's way of doing things, they cannot be deleted. However, some of them, and perhaps all of them, can be excluded from access with Mail or other email clients, and won't display in the Sidebar. Is that of interest to you?

Ernie

Mar 3, 2011 1:43 PM in response to Ernie Stamper

Many thanks again.

Quoting:
"However, some of them, and perhaps all of them, can be excluded from access with Mail or other email clients, and won't display in the Sidebar. Is that of interest to you?"

YES, because this never happened before and just started when I had to link my YouTube account to my Gmail account. Weird... But it must not be that because I get duplicates from any sender.

Mar 3, 2011 1:48 PM in response to juca2929

It should have been the case from day one of accessing the Gmail account as IMAP!



To exclude the All Mail, SPAM and other folders for IMAP access do a Google search with Gmail and Advanced IMAP Controls. You should be able to exclude these folders, and to do so sign on to your Gmail account, click on Settings, then on Labs, and enable advanced IMAP control. Once that is done, you can then click on Labels tab in Settings and make some selections -- those that can be excluded will be in the list.

Caution -- I recently learned that a Blackberry needs the All Mail to access, but not the case with other phones, such as iPhone. See also:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78755

Ernie

May 16, 2011 9:53 PM in response to juca2929

I've been searching for how to turn the Gmail IMAP grey/white folders to blue and came across this thread. It has triggered a lightbulb in my brain so I'll add my discoveries (which are not necessarily specific to the original post in this thread).....


The grey/white folder icon in Apple Mail represents a "folder" and the blue folder icon represents a "mailbox". "Folders" cannot contain messages, they can only contain mailboxes or other "folders". Mailboxes can contain any of messages, folders, mailboxes.


In Gmail the "folders" are actually labels, and subfolders are formed by having a slash "/" in the label name.


If a label representing a subfolder exists on Gmail but there is no label representing the parent folder, then Apple Mail will show the parent icon as a folder (grey/white icon).


The origin of these grey/white folders would seem to usually be from a migration/upload process from an old mail account to Gmail where the migration did not create a label for the parent folder. In my case a migration from Windows Outlook.


The way to turn the white IMAP folders to blue, and hence allow them to contain messages, is to create a label in Gmail with the same name as that white folder. When Apple Mail next synchronises it will set the icon to blue.

Aug 11, 2011 5:57 AM in response to juca2929

Hi Juca,


I am exactly at the same point where you are. I can't get rid of the white and empty [Google Mail] folder. I accepted that I have a white folder in my Mail because it seems that it is not possible to get rid of this. The problem here, I guess, is that this folder actually contains the folders drafts/sent/trash/junk because after you assigned them to be the folders for drafts/sent/trash/junk in Apple Mail they actually stay in the folder [Google Mail] - but you can't see them in Mail because they appear at their proper position.


That is the way google is organizing its mailboxes (or labels) and since you can't change this structure on the google server, we just have to live with this white folder.


But let me know if you discovered a way to get rid of it.

Best, AirMcEnroe

Jan 17, 2014 7:31 AM in response to Kiwi Graham

There is lots of confusion regarding these not deletable white folders in Mail. Gmail is mentioned, as well as Google's internal setup ythat can't be modified and much more.

In my case I have an email archive backup on iCloud and this white folder was there since January1. Tried to delete unsuccessfully. The reply was: Can't delete folder because it is not existing...

After reading tons of mails regarding white folders I simply tried thefollowing:

1) if the white folder contains blue subfolders it will not delete.

2) I deleted the blue subfolders, they where deleted properly

3) white subfolders may contain other blue folders. Delete them first. Then delete the empty white subfolder.

4) once all the blue and white subfolders contained in a white folder have been deleted, I could finally delete the top white folder!


Have no idea if this might help any of you. It finally worked for me. 🙂

Have a splendid 2014


Yve

I have one Gmail grey folder in Mail. What is it doing there? Please help

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