Difference between Inbox and All Mail confusing

Question

Level 1

8 points

Difference between Inbox and All Mail confusing

I've recently started using Apple Mail. I have 4 separate accounts which I configured successfully. When I click on Inbox, I see four separate inboxes, one for each account. One of them is Gmail.

Further down the menu, there is a folder called All Mail (Gmail). Many emails I receive also appear here but by no means only those sent or received via my Gmail account. Also, emails I have sent appear here too.

However, I have to check both the Inbox as well as the All Mail folder for new mails. This doesn't make sense to me. Can anyone explain?

Thanks in advance!

Posted on Feb 5, 2014 2:18 AM

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Answer 1

dwb

Level 7

33,244 points

Feb 5, 2014 5:08 AM in response to NJW123

In the picture above you can see I have way too many email accounts 🙂. At the moment I have 2 emails waiting from the first account in the list but more typically I'd have several emails from 4 or 5 of them. If I click on the Inbox at the top, I'll be able to see the headers of all of the emails regardless of which account they are from. However, if I wanted to look at the email only from my business account I'd click on the icon right below the Inbox which represents my business account's inbox. Or I could click on the icon two below the Inbox which is my family email account and I'd see only the messages sent from my family members.

I've arranged my Email side bar so that VIP, Sent and Junk boxes are next. Below those each of my accounts appear. While at the very top all my account Inboxes are accessible, in this second section I can see the rest of the folders that belong to each account. In other words, my iCloud inbox is easily and quckly accessible at the top so I don't have to scroll around to find it. However, my iCloud account has other folders, including Sent and Trash that were automatically created and several others I created myself. Since I don't need to access them as frequently they appear lower in the list (and can even be hidden if I choose).

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,144 points

Feb 5, 2014 4:56 AM in response to NJW123

That is what Gmail does. It's not standard IMAP at all, and fakes it using what it refers to as Labels.

Every email that comes in through Google is tagged with both an Inbox Label and an All Mail Label.

Moving and email on Google's servers doesn't move it from one folder to another, it just removes and adds Labels. The All Mail label is never removed unless you delete the message from the All Mail folder. When you do that, Google will warn you that it cannot harvest your personal information if it doesn't hold onto every email you send and receive (yes, I'm paraphrasing a little 😉).

I have been using the settings suggested here: http://jeffschuette.com/2012/03/07/setting-up-apple-mail-to-rock-and-roll-with-g mail/

That tames Gmail such that when I delete something, it actually gets deleted.

Also note that you can disable viewing the All Mail folder (which I do). I'm not sure if it was referenced specifically in that article, but Jeff does show how to enable or disable labels in IMAP, which is what you would do to hide the All Mail folder.

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