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Gmail accounts, filters and folders

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  • Last reply by david

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Hi! I am requesting some help with setting up thunderbird in a particular configuration. I have a gmail account and I essentially want to use thunderbird to download and save all of the email in the account including spam folders automatically. I want the emails to stay in the local folder no matter if it is deleted on the server or not.

I successfully set up the account and have been able to access emails. I set up a filter to take all incoming emails and copy them to a local folder. The rule is run before junk processing. It does copy over all emails except that it does not copy over any from the spam folder. I see that there is a way to go to the filter menu and pick the specific folder and then sync that to the local folder but I don’t see any way to set this to be done automatically.

Is there any way to have the spam folder contents copied over to a local folder without doing it manually?

I appreciate the assistance!

Hi! I am requesting some help with setting up thunderbird in a particular configuration. I have a gmail account and I essentially want to use thunderbird to download and save all of the email in the account including spam folders automatically. I want the emails to stay in the local folder no matter if it is deleted on the server or not. I successfully set up the account and have been able to access emails. I set up a filter to take all incoming emails and copy them to a local folder. The rule is run before junk processing. It does copy over all emails except that it does not copy over any from the spam folder. I see that there is a way to go to the filter menu and pick the specific folder and then sync that to the local folder but I don’t see any way to set this to be done automatically. Is there any way to have the spam folder contents copied over to a local folder without doing it manually? I appreciate the assistance!

All Replies (5)

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I assume you have set the account up as a POP account, as IMAP will not do what you want. For the SPAM, I suggest creating a filter that runs for new mail to copy the messages.

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No I have it set up as IMAP. Why would IMAP not work to get the spam folder? I thought it was the other way around where POP could not fetch anything except the inbox folder.

I do have a filter setup to match all (this is not for specific spam, I am actually trying to get all of the emails copied including all spam emails), however the filter does not run on the spam folder. It only runs in the inbox.

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I assumed POP because you want it saved on PC, which is a strength of POP. With POP, there is no need to copy to local folders. Not that you can't be successful with your approach, but you did ask for ideas.

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So does POP allow you to get emails in the spam folder/label? Everything I’ve seen online suggests only things within the inbox and not folders/labels like spam, etc can be downloaded via POP…

I’ve seen these and other threads online… https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9132843/how-to-download-emails-from-junk-folder-using-pop3?rq=1

https://superuser.com/questions/99968/can-i-access-gmails-spam-message-folder-using-pop3-imap

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Some providers allow it; some don't. More info at this thread: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1270539 And as I said, it was just a comment. For me, if saving all messages on PC was primary, I would use POP, but you also want to capture all SPAM.