Where did my Gmail labels go?

Gmail lets one message carry several labels. Most of the rest of email, including this, models the same idea as folders — and a message can be in more than one.

When your mail was imported, each label became a folder of the same name, and each message was placed in every folder its labels named. It is one message, not several copies: read it in one place and it is read in all of them.

Two Gmail labels deliberately did not become folders:

• Important and the Categories (Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums). Those are Gmail’s guesses about your mail rather than folders you made, and turning them into folders would have put a second copy of most of your archive into four more places.

Your All Mail did not become a folder either. Everything that was in it is in this mailbox; a folder containing all of it as well would double what you are looking at.