Tim here. There are a number of parts involved in email, and managing the email depends on any/all of those bits. Beware, a bit of a flood of info falls below (you've never known me to be anything but prolix) On the user-facing end of things, you have your "mail user agent" (MUA). This either stores mail locally to where it's running or it access a remote folder-structure via IMAP (or, if you're stuck with Microsoft, they created their own MAPI protocol just to make it hard to interoperate). If you keep your mail locally, you can either fetch it from a remote machine (usually via POP3), optionally deleting it from that remote machine; or you can just have a local cache with the authority being kept on the remote mailserver, accessed via IMAP. Mail can be kept locally in a number of common formats, but most frequently you'll find "mbox" (a single file acts as a folder holding all the messages) and "Maildir" (each message is in its own file) formats. Email management can happen either on the mail-server itself where the admin might define rules like "mail coming from this server is always spam, just delete it before users ever even see it"; or mail management can happen in the local MUA where you can manually move/copy/delete messages, or set up filters to run (automatically or manually) to take some of the druge-work out of it. When you send mail, some programs just submit to the local system utilities for sending mail and let it worry about getting the mail to the other end. Other times your MUA talks directly to a mail-server via SMTP to send mail. Since it involves mail-servers talking to other mail-servers, so either side can institute management decisions in the process. It sounds like you're SSHing into a remote machine and running Alpine there where it talks directly to the Gmail servers via IMAP (where the mail remains on Google's servers). Gmail does some internal IMAP trickery to present each label as an IMAP folder, so deleting a message from a label-folder is more like removing the label; and copying a file to a label-folder is like adding a label. Though it should still have some common-type folders (there's no standardized naming) like "Trash" or "Deleted Items", "Junk" or "Spam", "Drafts" or "Queue", etc. So when you ask "which system matters?" they all do in a way. However, message *sorting* (the order in which they're presented; different from filtering or categorizing) is usually a MUA thing. The Gmail web interface might sort one way (IIRC it does a top-level priority-based sort, and then sorts by a user-defined method inside, such as by received-date or thread) while Alpine (or mutt/neomutt or aerc or Thunderbird or whatever) should be able to sort by whatever aspects you prefer (date, recipient, thread, etc). Hopefully that makes sense? -tim On 2023-12-28 00:56, Karen Lewellen wrote: > Hi All, > Going to ask this carefully, so as to avoid confusion. > Given that there are different email clients, alpine, Thunderbird, and the > like, what actually determines how email gets managed, the client, or the > source? > there is a member of the greater Toronto Linux users group who has set up a > mail server where I use alpine to access gmail. > However, because he has never used alpine, nor has he used basic html in > gmail, he is basing the expected sorting on the standard gmail process. that > process does not use folders at all, but labels apparently. > as a result,there are things I imagine alpine expects to find which is not > here. We are using imap for gmail, but my personal experience of imap, > based on dreamhost, still has a mail folder with saved messages, sent mail, > postponed messages probably spam etc. > and an imap folder which has other elements unique to dreamhost. > > I would guess Thunderbird has its own sorting system. > My question is this. > If you are using imap for gmail, or yahoo mail or whatever, in a client like > alpine or Thunderbird which system matters, the source where the email comes > from, or the client you are using? > Hope question is clear, > Karen > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blinux-list+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxx.