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The directions I gave on how to get rid of Sent Mail in Mail.app work well, but have one drawback: the only way to access sent messages is to perform a “from:me” search in All Mail. Even so, the result is not a list of messages with cleanly displayed recipients’ names, but a simple subset of All Mail, where sent messages are marked by “me” as the sender.
There’s a workaround to this, that allows users to keep their Sent folder intact on the web interface, without being overwhelmed by its size on a local computer.
Once again, custom labels come in handy. The solution is to create a new label called, for example “Sent X” (where, again, the X stands for the name of the account. But really, it’s up to the user to choose the appropriate name). At the same time, thanks to the Labs tweak that allows to hide specific labels from IMAP clients, the regular Sent Mail folder can be turned off, so it won’t show up in Mail.app.
Mail.app, once started, will refresh the IMAP tree, but since it won’t find the folder previously used as Sent Mail, it will create a local one for that purpose. The new, custom Sent X folder will now appear in the IMAP folder list. This folder can now be used as the designated Sent folder by clicking on it and choosing Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For > Sent from the menu bar. In the Mailbox Behavior preferences, one can choose the lifetime of sent mail, as previously described.
What happens here is exactly the same as before, with sent messages being removed from the custom Sent folder – but not deleted from the account – after the specified time, but with a difference: Gmail now interprets it as a removal of the Sent X label, and not as a removal of the messages from the Sent Mail folder/label. This way, all sent messages are still available on the web interface in the appropriate folder, as well as in All Mail, of course, yet they don’t fill up the hard drive on the local machine.
Once again, it’s important to remember that if messages are manually deleted in Mail.app they will actually be trashed in Gmail. If, on the other hand, Mail.app removes them from the Sent folder after a certain time, specified in Preferences, they will still be kept in All Mail.