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Dual folders in Thunderbird. Sent & Sent Mail, and Drafts and Drafts. How to consolidate?

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  • Last reply by david

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I have 3 machines with Thunderbird. A while back I noticed that I had duplicate folders for sent mail (Sent & Sent Mail) and for Drafts. (Drafts and Drafts) I did a search and found a discussion from 2019, but nothing more recent. That one kinda lost me. I just got a new machine and installed Thunderbird again. My Gmail account on the new machine shows the same dual folders. Hopefully someone here can detail a solution in steps for a moron like myself.

I have 3 machines with Thunderbird. A while back I noticed that I had duplicate folders for sent mail (Sent & Sent Mail) and for Drafts. (Drafts and Drafts) I did a search and found a discussion from 2019, but nothing more recent. That one kinda lost me. I just got a new machine and installed Thunderbird again. My Gmail account on the new machine shows the same dual folders. Hopefully someone here can detail a solution in steps for a moron like myself.
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One reason that happens is because email providers have their own idea of what folders should be name, such as sent-mail vs sent. Some let you delete the non-standard folder, while others do not. Anyway, on your question, the easiest approach I've seen is to use the addon, importexport. With it, you can highlight a folder and export as eml files and then highlight the other folder and import the eml files. That merges them . If needed, there is an addon, remove duplicate messages, to clear out duplicates.

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david said

One reason that happens is because email providers have their own idea of what folders should be name, such as sent-mail vs sent. Some let you delete the non-standard folder, while others do not. Anyway, on your question, the easiest approach I've seen is to use the addon, importexport. With it, you can highlight a folder and export as eml files and then highlight the other folder and import the eml files. That merges them . If needed, there is an addon, remove duplicate messages, to clear out duplicates.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not concerned with duplicate emails. Both folders seem to have the same content. I want to remove the duplicate folder from showing up in the list.

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It can depend on the email provider to a degree. For example, Outlook always saves the sent message, so if you have clicked to save sent messages, you might be saving to a different folder. That's normally the case when both have the same content. If one has content and the other doesn't, or has different content, that usually happens when a user sends messages sometimes online and sometimes from Thunderbird, as some email providers have a predefined name for some folders. For more specifics, you may need to post the email provider info and setting for saved sent messages.

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David, I have a Gmail account and Yahoo account that have double folders. My other two email accounts do not.

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I'm not familiar with Yahoo, but I imagine it's similar to Gmail. With Gmail, there is only one sent folder. all others are just labels, such as Allmail. If you are showing two sent folders, I think you can highlight the account, rightclick and select 'subscribe' and unsubscribe for the extra sent folder.