Trying to drag and drop labels/folders in the left hand panel but nothing is happening when I try.
The context menu with a right mouse click just shows the options ‘Rename’ and ‘Delete’.
Is this not possible?
I think, at present, Mailspring displays folders from each account in alphabetical order (and, indeed, shows the accounts in alphabetical order, too). There’s a thread here asking for the addition of a feature to allow manual sorting so do add your vote! 
Ah yes, I see that.
That would be good sure but even just moving a label into a folder in alphabetical order is what I was after - it’s not even possible to do that it seems. 
I’ve voted on that one anyway but more to the point, how is everyone even creating labels…? I can’t even figure out how to create new ones.
Not quite sure what you want to achieve here. Do you want to be able to rearrange the folder structure from within Mailspring? If so, I don’t think that’s possible - you’d have to visit the mail host’s service. (This is a common issue in mail clients in my experience.)
You can create new folders/labels within Mailspring, including subfolders. You create a folder in a subfolder by naming it with a slash in: to create a folder Foo inside a folder Bar, you would hit the ‘Create’ option and enter ‘Bar/Foo’ as your desired folder name. (Again, this is a fairly common pattern in mail clients, although it’s also not ideal.)
(To create a new folder for an account, I can hover my mouse over the account name in the left-hand sidebar and then click the + button that appears, and type a folder name.)
Hope that helps!
Ahh, did not see the + icon when hovering over the title ‘Labels’.
Okay. So that creates a label, no way of adding it as a child of another label though so it just automatically places it in the alphabetical list of parent labels with also, no way of dragging it into another label or as you originally stated, re-arranging in a custom way.
Yeh, this current functionality for labels is nowhere near suitable enough to work with in my case as I need to regularly create and move labels. And frustratingly, will cause me to walk away from Mailspring. I’ll ensure that there is a feature request in place for all of the above and give it some time - I can only hope for some quick attention.
Thanks
As I say, you can create a child label by using the ‘Foo/Bar’ notation - start with the name of the parent you want, then type a slash and the name of the child you want. It’s not ideal but it should work.
(It’s odd how many mail clients lack any functionality for managing folders on the server. You’d think it’d be an obvious thing to do for an IMAP client but apparently not!)
This did not work for me - I just tried it.
I have never used an email client where this was not possible.
Every other email client I have used on Windows has allowed the creation and organisation of folders (at least from what I remember) - and I have used at least 25 over the years.
Odd - it works for me! 
The major mail clients all support folder management IME, but as you try out smaller and open-source apps like Mailspring, it seems to be one of the things that gets missed sometimes. But I agree that the weak folder management in Mailspring isn’t good (although, as I say, you can create, rename and delete folders - you just can’t move them about). If you regularly rearrange your folder structure I can absolutely see that it’d be a potential deal breaker. Personally, I have a well-established folder structure that I now rarely change, so I can deal with it.
(One thing to watch is comparing, say, Outlook running on Exchange Server with pretty much anything else. Those two are basically a single system that are tightly coupled. A general mail client connecting to general IMAP servers is quite a different kettle of fish - especially when you throw GMail into the mix, which has its own distinct idiosyncracies!)
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All of our business mailboxes are via Gmail’s servers yeah as we use Google Workspace.
Took a while getting used to their labels via IMAP when we switched I must admit.
That works for me with Gmail accounts. It does take a bit to sync so it looks correct though. As a result, I usually launch the Gmail in a browser to make my label changes.
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Sure but if I do that (which is not practical across our entire business), we don’t need Mailspring at all as we can do everything and more from within Gmail in browser…