Al,
Thank you very much! You explained a lot of gave me some ideas.
Things were much simpler with POP3 :)


>Replies in-line:
>
>N.B. I'm a very infrequent Gmail user. I've been learning some stuff by Googling ;)
>
>>I set up one of my email accounts in Outlook to connect to the Gmail using IMAP. Outlook created a new folder: myname@gmail.com. In this folder I see several sub-folders:
>>Inbox
>>Draft
>>Sent Mail
>>Trash
>>Important
>>and so on.
>>
>>I find that there are messages in the Trash box that I deleted before in my iOS device (iPhone or iPad).
>>Question 1. Does it mean that Gmail didn't get rid of the messages but simply copied them to the Trash Folder?
>
>Gmail apparently doesn't have the concept of individual mail folders. Everything is in one underlying "All mail" mailbox. Tags get automatically applied to some mail items, such as "Inbox", "Sent Mail", etc. When you click on what Outlook users would think of as a "folder" (say, Inbox), what actually happens is Gmail filters the "All mail" mailbox and presents a view containing only those messages which have the "Inbox" tag. It looks like there are some pre-defined views such as Inbox, Sent mail, Trash etc.
>
>One thing which is kind of cool is apparently you can apply multiple user-defined tags to a single message, so it can appear in multiple different user-defined views.
>
>If you delete an item from the Inbox, the "Inbox" tag gets removed and a "Trash" tag gets applied. The message disappears from the "Inbox" view and appears in the "Trash" view.
>
>Speaking specifically of Trash, mail systems typically require some sort of double-delete process to permanently get rid of mail items. This is to protect users from themselves and allow recovery if deleted by mistake. You see that in Outlook - if you delete an item, by default it goes into Deleted Items. If you want to permanently delete it, you delete it from there. Or, you can bypass the Deleted Items folder and permanently delete immediately, by pressing Shift-Delete instead of just Delete on a given item.
>
>There's some information on how Gmail trash works at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7401 .
>
>In your specific case, unless you manually permanently delete a Trash item before 30 days ("Empty your trash", above), I'd expect those items to remain visible in the Trash view on all devices that connect to that Gmail mailbox via IMAP.
>
>Hopefully you already understand that with an IMAP account/mailbox, the sole message/item store is the IMAP server. In your case, the Gmail cloud. All e-mail clients - whether a desktop fat client like Outlook, Apple Mail, or a webmail interface, are only ever presenting a view of what is on the IMAP server. If you use Outlook to move an item to Trash, then the next time your phone, iPad etc. sync with Gmail, that item will have moved to the Trash view there as well. And vice-versa, of course.
>
>If having all your mail on the Gmail IMAP server makes you nervous, in Outlook you can export the entire mailbox to a local PST file. That will copy everything from the IMAP server to the new PST file you specify. Actually, for performance reasons Outlook will probably copy the contents of the local OST cache file that corresponds to the Gmail account to the PST file and only download from Gmail any items not currently synced in the OST file.
>
>If you want to get cute, in Outlook you should be able to copy items from Gmail to any other account you have set up. That could be another cloud account such as Outlook.com. That might be one way to get a backup of your mail to a separate cloud service. You could experiment with Outlook rules to auto-forward messages.
>
>>I find a bunch of email messages in the Important box. For example, email notifications I received from LE of someone replying to my message.
>>Question 2. How does Google "decide" what is important? Where do I set which senders are important and which are not?
>
>It looks like it's an opaque Google algorithm - my Google-fu pulls up https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186543?hl=en