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Is it possible to use Thunderbird to properly sort Gmail messages in label view?

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  • Last reply by Matt

nacim.bouchtia
nacim.bouchtia
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This issue is a bit complicated to describe so please bear with me.

When you label a conversation thread in Gmail, Gmail apparently only attaches the label to a discrete message within that thread. Therefore, when you view the messages through the label view, they are not sorted by 'last message in thread' but instead based on when you applied the label to the thread.

This user described the same issue: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/4048418?hl=en

Curiously though, they appear just fine in Thunderbird. Does anyone have any insight on how to "force" Gmail to continuously update the labeled threads so that the label view displays them in order of message last received?

This issue is a bit complicated to describe so please bear with me. When you label a conversation thread in Gmail, Gmail apparently only attaches the label to a discrete message within that thread. Therefore, when you view the messages through the label view, they are not sorted by 'last message in thread' but instead based on when you applied the label to the thread. This user described the same issue: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/4048418?hl=en Curiously though, they appear just fine in Thunderbird. Does anyone have any insight on how to "force" Gmail to continuously update the labeled threads so that the label view displays them in order of message last received?

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Matt
Matt
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Thunderbird works on a "folder" and there is an on the fly conversion of Google labels into IMAP folders.

What happens is a combination of Googles rather odd implementation of IMAP to fit with their label system and some special code for Google that Thunderbird contains. But over all it is that Thunderbird is a specialist mail application with a lot of options. Gmail is a web application designed to suit most of the people most of the time without needing much support. Depth of options is really not there as that complicates a clean interface. So nothing that Thunderbird does can really translate to what happens in Gmails web interface.

This is not the place to seek support for your use of the GMail web interface as it is a code base owned and maintained by Google. The have not released it under a open source license that I am aware of.

Modified by Matt