Moving Mail from one Gmail account to another results in Garbled Dates
-
I often move email from one mail account to another using my local email client. These emails are not forwarded - the local email client's (Thunderbird or Vivaldi Mail) move command moves the email from one account to another while preserving the original sent date and time of the email (among other things, it allows one to have mail in Gmail dated 1996).
If I use Thunderbird's move command to move an email from one Gmail account to another, it works as one expects it to - the email appears in the second account with the original email date/time preserved, and it is also deleted from the first account. However when I use Vivaldi Mail's move command to move the email from one Gmail account to another, the email appears in the second Gmail account, but is not deleted from the first account - in effect the email is copied.
Well okay. But if I try to delete the email from the first Gmail account, the email goes to the Bin rather than being removed completely, so I then have to delete it permanently from the Bin. This process feels unintuitive - as if there are three steps instead of one, with not quite enough feedback for me to determine if I have done the correct thing or not.
The real problem is that when I view a moved email (now in the second account) in Gmail on a web browser, Gmail reports the message date as the time that I moved the email and not the original message date. Somewhat bizarrely, Vivaldi Mail sees the correct original date for the moved message, and if the message is viewed in Thunderbird, Thunderbird also sees the correct original date for the moved message.
I'm not sure what to make of this. It feels like there is a subtle problem, but I'm not sure if it's on Vivaldi's end or Gmail's end. Either way, I'm reverting to Thunderbird for now, since I'm not keen on my email dates appearing to be corrupted.
That said, I like Vivaldi Mail - the user interface is much better than Thunderbird's. If I could figure out why this has happened, I'd happily return to Vivaldi Mail.
UPDATE: I've resolved the problem by
(a) using Thunderbird to copy the 12 affected emails from the second account back to the first account, where the correct dates/times for the messages reappeared.
(b) then using Gmail in a web browser to delete the 12 emails from the second account where the the incorrect dates/times were being shown. I also deleted these permanently from Gmail's Trash as well.
(c) then using Thunderbird I copied the 12 affected emails from the first account to the second account again, as if I was doing this process for the first time. All the emails displayed correctly in the second account now.OS: Linux Mint 22. Vivaldi ver. 6.9.3447.41 Stable
Both Vivaldi Mail and Thunderbird have IMAP connections to the GMail accounts. -
@bluewave I see this also. I don't know why Gmail decides to show the timestamp for the move action instead of the sent date from the header of the message. There is not much we can do about that.
The problem with the message not really being moved but being copied is also a gmail thing because they always keep an "archived" copy in their All Mail folder. There is a pending bug report on the inability to truly delete gmail messages with Vivaldi mail client. -
Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
