User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Wanted to clean archive folder to be empty without any files downloaded

Actual results:

Clicking accidentally archive, it started downloading all emails

Expected results:

I should be able to remove archive emails not to be on thunderbird.

re gmail imap account.

Gmail stores everything in the 'All Mail' folder and in webmail account facilitates viewing in a folder like structure by applying labels, so basically the emails are a virtual view. It means you can apply any number of labels to one email and get that one email visible in a number of folder-like views for easy use.

Thunderbird has no knowledge of 'labels', so when it downloads full copies from those 'labels' they get physically stored in mbox files - not a virtual view.
When you click on 'Archive' - gmail removes the labels so email is no longer seen in any label/folder but email is not deleted and gmail keeps email stored in the 'All Mail' folder.
You only Archive emails that are shown in any folder except the 'All Mail' folder.

Personally, I want to easily find archived emails, so I created an 'Archive' folder, set up gmail imap account to store archived emails in the 'Archive' folder, so I have a complete separate list. I do not subscribe to see 'All Mail' because I do not need a complete duplicate of everything.

Advise you do not do anything in the 'All Mail' folder because you could accidentally delete emails completely. If emails are not in 'All Mail' then they cannot be displayed in any folder because they do not exist on server. Imap account folders synchronise with server and can only display whatever is on server in relevant label.

If you subscribe to see the 'All Mail' folder then you will still see that archived email.
Have you unsubscribed from seeing the 'All Mail' folder ?

Indeed, for gmail you can't really remove local copies on a per folder basis. But like Anje writes, you can unsubscribe to the All folder all together.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #2)

Indeed, for gmail you can't really remove local copies on a per folder basis. But like Anje writes, you can unsubscribe to the All folder all together.

However, I am sure I saw a bug where it was resubscribed when the archive function was used, as that is the archive folder.

-> WFM as there's a solution per comment 2