Delete folders appearing gray

This guide explains how to delete folders that appear in gray in Mail or in certain email clients such as Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Microsoft Outlook.

Ghost Folders

Some email clients like Microsoft Outlook allow you to create subfolders of nonexistent folders. For example, it's possible to create the folder /abc/klm/xyz even though the folder "klm" doesn't exist.

In Mail or other email clients, ghost folders like the "klm" folder in our example appear in gray and cannot be deleted directly.

To delete these ghost folders, you need to delete their subfolders first (in our example: xyz).