See your Trupeo labels in Thunderbird

On an IMAP mailbox, the labels you put on conversations live in Trupeo. Trupeo also writes each one on the emails of the conversation, at your mail server, as an IMAP tag (a keyword). Thunderbird can show that tag, with a name and a color, next to the email.

What Trupeo writes on your emails

• When you put a label on a conversation, every email of the conversation gets its tag at the server: in the Inbox, in Sent, in the archive and in your own folders. New emails of the conversation get it too.
• When you take the label off, or delete the label, the tag comes off those emails.
• Trupeo never moves an email to do this. A tag that matches none of your Trupeo labels, such as one you made yourself in Thunderbird or its “Junk” mark, stays where it is.
• A tag with the same name as a Trupeo label belongs to that label. Put it on an email in Thunderbird and the conversation gets the label in Trupeo (see the part on tags you set in Thunderbird, below).

It usually reaches the server within a minute.

Thunderbird needs a tag of the same name

Thunderbird only shows a tag it already knows. It never creates one from what it finds on your emails. So for each Trupeo label you want to see, create a tag with the same name in Thunderbird, once:

1. In Thunderbird, right-click an email, then choose “Tag” and “New Tag”.
2. Type exactly the name of the Trupeo label, for instance Urgent, and pick a color. For a label under another one, type its full path, as in Clients/Acme, not only Acme.
3. Confirm. The emails that carry the label in Trupeo now show the tag.

Capital letters do not matter: Urgent and urgent are the same tag.

Thunderbird already has five tags of its own: Important, Work, Personal, To Do and Later (Important, Travail, Personnel, À faire and En attente in French). It refuses a new tag with one of those names, and renaming one of them does not help. To see a Trupeo label called Important, first delete Thunderbird’s own “Important” tag in Thunderbird’s settings (Tags), then create yours. Or give the label another name in Trupeo.

A few names are used by mail apps for their own purpose, such as Junk, NonJunk or Forwarded. A Trupeo label with one of those names never shows in Thunderbird: pick another name for it.

Which names match

• A name made only of letters without accents, digits, -, _ and ., such as Urgent, Invoices or Quotes-2026, matches on every version of Thunderbird. This is the safest choice.
• Any other name, with a space, an accent, a / (a label under another one), & or brackets, such as Customer invoice, Réclamation, Clients/Acme or R&D, only matches on Thunderbird 153 and later. On an older Thunderbird, a tag with that name does not pick up the label.

When you rename a label in Trupeo, the tag written on your emails does not change: the Thunderbird tag created with the first name keeps working. You can rename that tag in Thunderbird too, it keeps matching.

A label deleted and then created again under the same name gets a new tag at the server: Trupeo never gives a deleted label’s tag to another label. The Thunderbird tag made for the old one does not pick up the new one.

The label’s color stays in Trupeo. In Thunderbird, the tag has the color you chose there.

When the labels stay in Trupeo

Some mail servers do not keep tags. On those, Trupeo cannot write the tag, and your labels simply stay in Trupeo. Once Trupeo has found that out, the window that changes a label’s color says: “These labels stay in Trupeo: your server does not pass them on to your mail app.”

A Gmail account connected as IMAP is one of them: Trupeo writes no tag there.

Most other mail apps (Apple Mail, Outlook, the mail apps on your phone) do not show IMAP tags at all, even when the server keeps them.

Tags you set in Thunderbird

A tag you add or remove in Thunderbird reaches Trupeo too, the next time Trupeo reads your mailbox: within a few minutes on a mailbox that received mail in the last hour, up to 45 minutes on a quiet one. Only the tags of your Trupeo labels count: any other tag stays in Thunderbird and changes nothing in Trupeo.

• Add a label’s tag to an email, and its conversation gets the label in Trupeo.
• Remove the tag from every email of the conversation, and the label comes off in Trupeo. While one email of the conversation still has it, the label stays.
• Create a Trupeo label with the name of a tag you already use in Thunderbird, and the conversations whose emails have that tag get the label at once.
• Moving an email to another folder never takes its label off, even on a server that loses tags on the way: Trupeo writes the tag again on the moved email.
• When you change a conversation’s labels in Trupeo and set or remove a tag in Thunderbird at about the same time, the change made last wins. A tag changed in Thunderbird just before your change in Trupeo does not undo it, even if Trupeo only reads that tag afterwards.
• If the same email sits in two folders, only the copy Trupeo shows counts.

See also Sort conversations with labels, and, to file emails in your server’s folders rather than label them, File emails in folders.