How can I make the GMail/ IMAP folder contents less conspicuous in Thunderbird?

Question

If you access a GMail account via IMAP (using Thunderbird), you'll notice that there's a GMail/ folder that you haven't created, and more specifically, the GMail/All Mail folder gets a copy of every message you receive.

Now, this is annoying in two ways:

1. You often see a "New Mail" indication for messages in GMail/ALl Mail, even though you've already seen this mail in the main folders and really do not want to be notified.
2. Having your Sent/ and other special folders in a subfolder is not the standard and means you have to open that subfolder and have to notice the All Mail folder, with your consciousness disturbed by the supposedly unread messages in it.

Can I reduce the "annoying effect" of that somehow? E.g. never download messages into All Mail? Auto mark them as read? Move the Sent folder out of the GMail folder? Make Thunderbird filter it out completely? Any idea could be useful.

Answer 1

Gmail works quite differently than other IMAP services. This GMAIL folder is special. It does not contain a copy of the email, but rather a link to it.

Yes, thunderbird does not really understand that and sees it as 2 mails, but if you set one of them as read, the other one goes as read too.

But they're more like filters or search folders.

That said, yes, you can simply disable this.

Right-click on your gmail account where the little collapse icon is in front of, and click subscribe.

A new list with all the folder subscriptions is shown. Uncheck everything below the [Gmail] folder, and press OK. You can't actually hide the [Gmail] folder itself, but the rest is gone.

You can choose to keep the spam folder if you want to see spam, but you can also decide to only show it if you really need it.

I always have these folders deselected and it worked for me for the past... I dunno how many years.