I have been a Gmail user for over 15+ years now. I use the stock Apple Mail app on my iPhone (14 Pro) and have waffled between using the web client and also Apple Mail on MacOS (MacBook Air M1). However, after recently rebuilding the mailbox I now have thousands of messages in the Recovered folder on my Mac. It seems like this is an issue where Apple mail doesn’t know where to file the messages locally; the messages appear to be present on the webmail version.
What’s the best solution to fix this issue? Is there another desktop client that is better for Gmail?
I have no idea what exactly causes Apple Mail to create Recovered folders, but it can occur with any email account (Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, etc). Apparently something in Mail.app occasionally misfires and it creates these folders as a result. This didn’t happen a lot to my users but when it did I had them delete the folders. (We archived all messages for seven years so they could recover anything that might have been lost)
When it happens to me these days the folders normally contain duplicates of messages that are in an account and I just delete them. YMMV. When in doubt you might want to export a copy of the folder(s) just in case.
I prefer webmail for Google Workspace on Mac and the Gmail.app on iOS.
Also for desktop users, Mimestream is the best native interface for GMail. It is currently on beta but probably will not be cheap once it is out of beta.
I agree. I was a Mailplane user and Mimestream looked good when I checked it out. However I use the entire Google Workspace suite and Mimestream said they had no plans to include Calendar, etc.
So I run GW in Google Chrome and use Safari or Edge for everything else.