Fair enough, I guess it's about differing usecases. The few labels that I do use on gmail are set up such that they are indistinguishable from folders (if they

Fair enough, I guess it's about differing usecases. The few labels that I do use on gmail are set up such that they are indistinguishable from folders (if they match a filter, they don't go in my inbox, and I don't have any overlapping labels). I also rarely have lingering draft emails, so I guess I've not noticed that particular issue (though I do use Mail.app, not thunderbird). Gmail's imap support has been adequate for me since they introduced it however long ago that was. YMMV Edit: my point about standards compliance for gmail imap was purely about it actually working with third party clients, I've always known that it doesn't conceptually work the same way as a standard imap server.