1612526 - Sent message is randomly not showing up in gmail Sent Mail

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Joseph Picone]

Attachment: Presentation1.pdf

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.130 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Sent an email message

Actual results:

A copy shows up in All Mail but not Sent Mail on Google's IMAP server

Expected results:

A copy should appear in Sent Mail. Note I have been doing this for years - my client is set up properly to save copies in Sent Mail. It works most of the time. But recently it appears to be sporadically losing messages with no feedback or error message.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

IIRC Sent is automatically populated by google. Do you see this messages in sent folder via the web interface?

Comment 2

[Matt]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #1)

IIRC Sent is automatically populated by google. Do you see this messages in sent folder via the web interface?

You are correct Wayne, the general advice handed to users complaining that their sent mail appears in the sent folder twice is to turn the saving of sent mail off in Thunderbird.

Gmail makes a copy and places it in the sent folder as the message goes out using their SMTP server. So I can only assume this is a cvase of incorrectly configured IMAP folders.

Comment 3

[Joseph Picone]

Attachment: (1) Screenshot of All Mail

Comment 4

[Joseph Picone]

Attachment: (2) Screen shot of Sent Mail

Comment 5

[Joseph Picone]

Attachment: (3) Screenshot of Gmail

Comment 6

[Joseph Picone]

Sorry it took so long to get back to you.

It happened again tonight, ironically on an important message.

The first screenshot is from my All Mail folder. I highlighted the message that I sent.

The second screenshot is from Sent Mail - the message is not there.

Th third screen shot is from Sent (in:sent) on Gmail. The message is clearly there (6:29 PM). But it is not showing up in Sent Mail on TBird.

This doesn't happen all the time - just sporadically. If I attempt to copy the messages from All Mail in TBird to Sent Mail, it still doesn't show up.

If it is useful, another problem has resurfaced. If I delete a folder in Thunderbird, it doesn't go away. I have to go into Gmail and delete the folder (a label in their terminology) and then restart Thunderbird. This problem seems to come and go about once a year.

I think somehow the IMAP server and TBird are not on the same page about the state of the mail.

Hope this is helpful.

-Joe

Comment 7

[Joseph Picone]

Attachment: (4) Folder arrangement

Comment 8

[Joseph Picone]

Let me emphasize this point. In the (4) Screenshot, I show my folders. I was able to manually copy it to ZJ_2020->Sent, which also resides on the IMAP server. But I can't manually copy it from All Mail to Sent Mail. So clearly these last two folders aren't in sync, or think it doesn't need to be copied.

Anyway, these kinds of hiccups are very disconcerting since I can't rely on Sent Mail to keep a copy of everything.

Comment 9

[Matt]

Thunderbird does not check the sent folder for new messages by default when getting mail, as it is inherently something that historically was added to by the client, not the server. Right-click the sent mail folder and in properties ensure "When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder is selected.

I also suggest setting the IMAP server directory in Thunderbirds Account settings > server settings > advanced to [Gmail]. That will significantly streamline your Thunderbird user interface and remove the duplication that occurs with sent mail junk and trash folders on two levels.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

It may help to set "allow immediate server notifications" in the Thunderbird account's server settings.

Comment 11

[Joseph Picone]

It was already set.