Archive email in Outlook and delete from Gmail All Mail

TimboJones

LET, I'm beating my head against the desk. I haven't figured out how to do this without a bunch of manually deleting and prone to errors.

In my old job, with ~15GB annual mail usage, with Microsoft exchange back end and Outlook desktop app, I would just setup an Auto Archive rule that would archive all emails older than Jan 1 and save it to a yearly dated PST file. No issue, mailbox size reduced and mail nicely organized by year with very little effort.

Now, when using Gmail, how does one go about archiving emails for offline reading but removed from Gmails mailbox so that the mailbox size isn't crazy high all the time? Gmail makes this very painful so that you just keep upgrading to larger storage sizes, I'm assuming.

Unless one deletes an email from within gmail GUI, emails deleted in Outlook just go to the All Mail (folder/label?) and need to be manually deleted. This is time consuming and prone to error. I guess the root cause is that archiving an email in Outlook is not "deleting" the email, just moving it and not getting it moved to Trash as a result?

Currently, my next best guess work around might be to apply a filter in gmail for all emails older than Jan 1, apply a custom identifying label, sync that to Outlook (which will be a folder), archive the new folder and then in gmail just delete all emails matching that label?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions on how to do this.

plumberg

Maybe try Google takeout to get your mail archive and yeah, then the painful part comes to manually delete emails from beginning. Still, saves you one step along the way

lowendtalkxdax

I use Thunderbird to keep a full copy of all my emails locally + backup regularly
I don't use Gmail and have blocked all Gmail because there was too much spam coming from Gmail addresses... (3 phishing mails every day, on average...) obviously there is no unsubscribe button, and once you answer accidentally, the amount of spam doubles...

DataRecovery

@TimboJones said:
Gmail makes this very painful so that you just keep upgrading to larger storage sizes, I'm assuming.

Yes. Clients must buy moar.

Unless one deletes an email from within gmail GUI, emails deleted in Outlook just go to the All Mail (folder/label?) and need to be manually deleted.

I can't tell about Outlook, but I was dealing with the same problem in Thunderbird some time ago.

"All mail" in gmail includes each and every message (Trash/Bin and "deleted" are also there). TB suggests at least unsubscribing from that folder: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Gmail (scroll down to "All Mail").

I do not recall the exact details, but I believe there was a setting for how to handle the emails removed from all (folder) labels.
That setting is either in the gmail GUI or in Thunderbird.

Quite likely it's "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" -> "When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder:" -> "Immediately delete the message forever"

Another thing to check is configuring the deletion as moving to the Trash folder. If possible, this should work as you need for sure.

Also read thoroughly what the Mozilla's KB (link above) says about labels. This is a known problem and they had to deal with google's labels implementation as well.