On Sat, 2022-03-12 at 14:08 +1030, Tim via users wrote:
On Fri, 2022-03-11 at 22:47 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
Actually it's the other way round. Gmail only has labels. It doesn't have folders, but in most cases labels can be treated as folders.
It certainly behaves like it does. I can make folders in Gmail using Evolution, and they appear like folders on the web interface. I thought I'd also done it the other way around in the past, but I can't remember.
It behaves *somewhat* like it has folders, but labels are actually a superset in terms of functionality. Specifically, a message can have multiple labels, so from the IMAP viewpoint it shows up in multiple folders. Most IMAP clients will treat these as independent copies, while in fact they are more akin to hard links in Linux terminology.
In Gmail every message has at least one label ("All Mail"), and most have at least two (e.g. "All Mail" and "Inbox") if not more. Archiving a mail consists of removing any labels other than "All Mail".
Although Gmail's IMAP implementation does its best to map these things onto IMAP operations, the mapping cannot be exactly 1-1.
poc