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Keep your Gmail labels when you read Gmail in a Mac mail app

5 October 2026 · searched as gmail labels in apple mail

Most Mac mail apps, Apple Mail among them, show Gmail labels as folders, and filing a message in one is the only way to label it. In MailCode a Gmail label stays a label: apply one here and it appears in Gmail on the web and on your phone; apply one there and it appears here.

How to do it

Add the Gmail account — Add Account ▸ Gmail and 🔑 Sign in with Google, or IMAP / SMTP with an app password. Labels sync either way.
Check that Settings ▸ Sync ▸ Sync labels with the mail server is on. It is, unless you have turned it off.
Open a conversation and click Label in the reading-pane toolbar, or right-click it ▸ Label…. Pick a label, or New label… to make one. Gmail shows it within moments.
Labels added in Gmail arrive with the mail. Click a label under Labels in the explorer to list everything that carries it — MailCode fetches that label’s mail from Gmail, so older messages you never scrolled to are there too.

MailCode: The label picker on an open conversation. — The label picker on an open conversation.

MailCode keeps one label per conversation; Gmail allows several per message, so a conversation shows the first, and the others stay reachable as folders. A new label is written to Gmail the first time you apply it, and deleting one in MailCode takes it off the mail but leaves the label in your Google account. A sublabel made here reaches Gmail as a label of its own, not nested. Other IMAP providers have nowhere to keep a label, so theirs stay on this device.

MailCode is a mail client for Mac and Windows that keeps your mail in a searchable archive on your own disk. Free for 14 days.

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