What Conversations Does to Your Real Gmail or Outlook Mailbox

Dealers ask this in blunt terms: is MonuDesk touching my real inbox? Here is the short answer. Read/unread, archive, trash, spam and restore move in both directions. Everything else you do in Conversations (starring, tagging, linking a thread to a contact or an order, assigning a teammate) stays inside MonuDesk and never touches Gmail or Outlook.

What travels, and which way

Two-way, MonuDesk and your mailbox stay in step:

• Read / unread. Marking a thread read here marks it read there, and reading it in Gmail or Outlook clears the dot here.

• Archive and Unarchive.

• Move to trash and Restore.

• Mark as spam and Not spam, including your provider's own spam verdict coming the other way.

MonuDesk only, your mailbox never sees it:

• Star. Starring a thread here does not star the message in Gmail or Outlook.

• Tags. Your own labels, shared across your company's Conversations.

• Linking to a contact or an order, and assigning a teammate.

Archiving on Gmail is a label, not a folder

Gmail has no Archive folder. Archiving in Gmail means one thing: removing the Inbox label. Everything else on the message stays.

MonuDesk now does exactly that. When you archive a thread here, MonuDesk edits only the Inbox label and leaves the rest of the message alone, so your other labels, your Gmail categories (Primary, Promotions, Updates and the rest) and the message's read state all survive. Unarchiving puts the Inbox label back, and also pulls the message out of Trash or Spam if it was sitting in either.

Outlook and other folder-based mailboxes are simpler: archiving moves the message into the Archive folder, and unarchiving moves it back to the Inbox.

One more Gmail nuance worth knowing: your own sent replies and drafts were never in the Inbox to begin with, so MonuDesk never reads them as archived.

Spam moves in both directions

Click Mark as spam on a thread and the message moves to Spam (Gmail) or Junk (Outlook) in your real mailbox. Click Not spam and it comes back to the Inbox, in both places.

It also flows the other way. MonuDesk reads your mailbox's own Spam or Junk folder, so a message your provider junked on its own shows up under the Spam filter here without you doing anything. The Spam rail is not just a list of things you flagged.

Spam threads are hidden from every other filter, including All and Unread, so junk never pads your unread count. Spam, Archived and Trash are mutually exclusive: putting a thread in one takes it out of the other two.

Trash never deletes anything permanently

Move to trash moves the message to Trash in Gmail or Outlook, and asks you to confirm first. Restore, from the Trash filter, brings it back to the Inbox in both places.

MonuDesk never permanently deletes mail from your provider. Whatever your mailbox does with its own Trash after that, on its own schedule, is between you and your provider.

Filing in the other direction works too: drop a message into Trash directly in Gmail or Outlook, and the thread lands in the Trash filter here.

Read state: personal here, shared there

This is the one place the two systems genuinely disagree, and it explains most of the confusion.

• In MonuDesk, read is per person. A thread you have not opened shows unread to you even if three teammates have read it.

• In Gmail and Outlook, read is per mailbox. There is one read state for the whole account.

So when anyone on your team opens a thread in MonuDesk, the message is marked read in the real mailbox, while your own unread dot in MonuDesk stays until you open it. That is expected, not a sync failure.

Coming the other way, a read in Gmail or Outlook is credited to the person who connected that mailbox, since the provider cannot tell MonuDesk which of your staff clicked. It clears their dot, not everybody's.

Mark as unread works both ways too: it restores the unread state in your real mailbox as well as here.

Timing, and when it does not go through

Mirroring is best effort and non-blocking. Your action in MonuDesk always takes effect immediately, and the mailbox catches up a moment later. Nothing you click will hang or fail because the provider is slow.

• New mail pushes in on its own, and a background check keeps running behind it. Conversations also re-checks about once a minute while the tab is open, and straight away whenever you come back to the tab, click back into the window, or your internet comes back. If your laptop sleeps or the connection drops, the live link keeps trying until it reconnects rather than quietly giving up, so you no longer have to reload the page to start getting mail again. To force a check yourself, click Refresh (the circular-arrow icon next to the search box).

• A single conversation can span many individual messages, so archiving a long thread may take a few seconds to finish moving all of them.

• A mailbox that is Disconnected, Revoked or in Error stops mirroring. Existing conversations stay readable; nothing new goes out or comes in until you reconnect.

What MonuDesk never does

• Never stores your email password. Connecting a mailbox stores a secure connection token from Google or Microsoft, nothing more.

• Never permanently deletes a message from your mailbox.

• Never reaches back further than 30 days. Connecting a mailbox imports the last 30 days of email and no more. Older mail stays where it is, untouched, and you read it in Gmail or Outlook.

• Never moves mail you did not act on. Reading a thread in MonuDesk marks it read; it does not file it anywhere.

• Never writes your stars, tags, links or assignments into the provider.

Disconnecting a mailbox leaves your real inbox exactly as it is and keeps the conversations already in MonuDesk readable.

Related articles:

• Filters, Search, Tags, Archive & Trash

• Connecting Your Mailbox (Gmail & Outlook)

• Conversations: Troubleshooting

• Private vs Shared Mailboxes