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on Thunderbird 38.01, when I set up a new email account, it ignores the archive preferences and archives everything to one folder, though old accounts work ok.

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Bill8519
Bill8519
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I installed Thunderbird on a different system and successfully migrated the profile, but early today Gmail wasn't picking up messages properly, so I ended up using Thunderbird's new account feature. (I also switched from POP to Imap for Gmail.) The newly created has no trouble picking up messages from the server, but when I try to archive, it dumps everything in one folder. My settings call for year and month folders. Every other account archives correctly. The newly created on doesn't.

I installed Thunderbird on a different system and successfully migrated the profile, but early today Gmail wasn't picking up messages properly, so I ended up using Thunderbird's new account feature. (I also switched from POP to Imap for Gmail.) The newly created has no trouble picking up messages from the server, but when I try to archive, it dumps everything in one folder. My settings call for year and month folders. Every other account archives correctly. The newly created on doesn't.

Chosen solution

While poking around, I may have answered my own question. Thunderbird wasn't ignoring the month and year settings for archiving completely. What it was doing was dumping all newly archived messages from the Gmail account into one folder. However, it was also archiving all of them to the old Gmail account archives folder and putting them in the correct subfolders there. That's odd, but it's workable. I assume Thunderbird recognized the same email address being used for the old account setup (that wasn't downloading mail any more for some reason) and the new one. I changed the folder settings on the new setup to point to the old archives folder, and now Thunderbird archives only one copy of each message, as it should.

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Bill8519
Bill8519 Question owner
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Chosen Solution

While poking around, I may have answered my own question. Thunderbird wasn't ignoring the month and year settings for archiving completely. What it was doing was dumping all newly archived messages from the Gmail account into one folder. However, it was also archiving all of them to the old Gmail account archives folder and putting them in the correct subfolders there. That's odd, but it's workable. I assume Thunderbird recognized the same email address being used for the old account setup (that wasn't downloading mail any more for some reason) and the new one. I changed the folder settings on the new setup to point to the old archives folder, and now Thunderbird archives only one copy of each message, as it should.