[Bob Cavanaugh]

Hi all,
I hope someone can help me answer this question, been dealing with this for about six weeks now.
First, the lengthy background. From the time I got a Gmail account in 2016 until about six weeks ago when Google decided to kill the Basic HTML view, I have been managing my Gmail account exclusively through the web interface and my iPhone’s mail app. Another thing to note is that I’m blind and use a screen reader, and the move to kill basic HTML was a controversial one among the blind community. Since I knew I was going to switch to an email at my own domain when I got that set up, and those two events happened to coincide with one another, I decided I didn’t want to learn the Gmail standard interface, and switch to managing my Gmail account with Outlook on the PC, continuing to use my phone as well. Right away, I began having problems with Gmail retaining everything, including things I trashed. I changed a setting in Gmail’s IMAP settings to move items to the trash folder if they had been marked by the client for deletion, which helped somewhat. Still, certain messages are being retained when I don’t want to retain them. Additionally, I’ve started cleaning out my account, which appears to have caused another problem, that being that messages that I’ve deleted from the Important folder appear to still remain in All Mail despite also being moved to Trash. So, my questions are as follows:
1. How do I search for all messages in All Mail but not in Important? I know a bit of Python, and with the help of ChatGPT, I wrote a program that is supposed to do this, but it doesn’t want to work. The program creates a label and is supposed to add messages to it that are not in the Important or Sent folders but are in All Mail. When the program runs though, it creates the label, but then claims the label is invalid, thus doesn’t finish. How can I fix this? Additionally, I’d like it to only look in All Mail, but it’s claiming All Mail in just about all possible combinations is also an invalid label. What’s the problem here, or am I going about this all wrong?
2. Initially, the Python program mentioned above was to try and find messages in All Mail and compare them to messages in Trash. If they had the same message ID, the message in All Mail was to be removed. If I can get the invalid label issue from question 1 fixed, perhaps this is the best way to go about this, but might there be another way? Since the program doesn’t seem to be having problems with the Important label anymore, I might go ahead and try that again, but it was also claiming that was an invalid label at first.
3. Assuming I can get this cleaned out, how can I prevent this from becoming an ongoing issue? I suppose I could always run the programs again, but is there an easier way?
Thanks,
Bob

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