One of the most important Thunderbird features for me is the ability to delete attachments, but preserve the Email message, as it allows keeping the record of communication without also clogging the Email storage with unnecessary files. Sending around scanned documents especially otherwise quickly adds up.

However, when doing this with a Gmail account

• In Thunderbird, the Email hasn't changed and continues to be shown with the attachments deleted, as intended.
• In Gmail, both versions of the Email (with deleted dummy attachments and with the original attachments) are still visible in the thread.

Closer inspection shows, that the version with attachments is simply archived on Gmails side, but in a threaded view that's not easily recognizable.

Asking ChatGPT about it [link] points out that this is caused by how labels are mapped to Thunderbird, so from that perspective the behavior makes sense. This way I also found out, that the original message is still visibile under "All Mail" (i.e. archived).

Making matters more confusing, Gmail's threaded view shows the message without attachments before the original message.

Is there any known workaround?

Posted originally in r/thunderbird as Deleting attachments leads to duplicate messages in Gmail but didn't get any responses for a while. There is also a

[Screenshot]

which isn't allowed here.