I found this bug recently after discovering that I have been losing
emails I had not intended to lose for an indeterminate period of time.
I am deeply angry, and I believe rightly so.

I have a gmail account.  I'm using Thunderbird 31.6.0 on Ubuntu linux.
The thunderbird UI clearly states, under Account Settings / Server
Settings:

"When I delete a message:"

and gives three options, one of which is:

"Move it to this folder: " with a selection box.

I selected [Gmail] -> All Mail.  Instead, when I push delete, the
message is not moved to that folder, but is moved to the [Gmail] ->
Trash folder.

Why, in the name of all that is decent and human, is that UI option not
simply removed, or greyed out, or annoted with a "this doesn't always
work" message, or SOMETHING, INSTEAD OF BEING SILENTLY IGNORED?  The
thunderbird UI is lying to me, and I lost data because of it.

I really like thunderbird. I love that it gives me a really nice way to
use OpenPGP.  I love that it is open source.  I love that it is clean an
functional.

I understand (now) that I can just push 'a' instead of <Delete>, and use
the archive function.  If it was just a matter of having to use a
different keyboard shortcut, that would be fine.

I understand (now) that it is a little complicated to fix this due to
Google changing the text label of the All Mail folder under certain
conditions.  I only mostly followed the technical details given by WADA
and others over the course of this thread.  Maybe I've gotten some
detail of that statement wrong.  It doesn't really matter.  Ignoring the
option is not the problem.  Special cases for gmail are not the problem.
The problem is that the UI said it would do one thing and in fact did
another, causing me to lose data.

This bug, it seems to me, highlights a deeper problem.  The problem is
not that the code hasn't been refactored to either gray out that option
or make it do what it says.  I understand that this is difficult and
time consuming for developers, and that there are other priorities, and
that this is a somewhat obscure option.  The problem is that nobody
seems to have thought about this problem from the perspective of the
user.  Even a static text message above that option would be preferable
to what we have now.  It could say something like:

"Note: this setting is ignored in some cases.  See <link>."

Heck, even without a link to more explanation it would be preferable to
what we have now.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/885525

Title:
  Deleting a Gmail Message Always Sends Item to [Gmail]/Trash

Status in Mozilla Thunderbird:
  Confirmed
Status in thunderbird package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Thunderbird 7.0.1, Ubuntu 11.10

  Gmail accounts do not obey the setting in Account Settings -->
  [Account] --> Server Settings --> When I delete a message

  I changed this to move the message to Gmail's "All Mail" folder,
  attempting to imitate the Gmail web interface's "Archive" option.
  However, regardless of setting, the item always moved to Trash. This
  persisted after restart of the client. The settings save, but have no
  effect.

  Caveat: This was tested on two Google Apps for Domains accounts,
  though I suspect this behavior will happen with gmail.com accounts as
  well.

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