Problem Statement
I’m in the process of de-googling, and I’m about 60% there, but I still need gmail for the things that I cannot or have not yet migrated.
I’ve also recently experimented w/ the Thunderbird app for both Linux and Android, and it’s okay. One thing that really irritates me is the fact that when I import my emails from gmail, all my labels are handled as folders in Thunderbird. This is an issue b/c I have rules to help organize incoming email by assigning one or more labels. I believe Thunderbird has the concept of tags, but by default Thunderbird routes gmail labels to folders instead of tags.
Question
Is there a mail client on Linux (and Android) that handles labels from gmail as tags instead of folders? Alternatively, is there a setting in Thunderbird that will use tags instead of labels that I’m just not aware of?
I’ve tried searching DDG, but came up with nothing useful beyond other posts on other social media websites asking similar questions.
I don’t know how many mails you have. But if that is what you want, then do the work… Import it into Thunderbird, select all mails in a folder, give them a tag, and move them where you want them. It might take a little time, but my guess is, that it will take way shorter time, than trying to find different programs to help you do it your way.
Oh, and maybe you could come up with a different system, than that google put on you… Just a thought here.
Agreed, this is where I’m at as well.
What I’ve had in place for the last decade or more made sense to me once upon a time, but it’s over engineered and of limited usefulness.
Despite the potential technical solutions offered in other comments, I’ve resolved to go through and clean up my email history, including deleting stuff I no longer need and reconfiguring how I assign labels to incoming messages in gmail in order to make sense to my current self and play nice with the folder system, which seems to be more industry standard anyway.
I can only applaud it. And a nice cleanup once every decade feels good too. :-)