Getting rid of the pesky Apple Mail To Do label in gmail

After having upgraded to Leopard 10.5.2 and enabling IMAP support through Mail.app, I have had a problem with a new label being consistently generated on my gmail account. No matter how many times I deleted it from gmail, Mail.app would happily recreate it every time I launched it.

Tonight, I was able to figure out how to make this go away. I dont know if it is because of the order of steps that I followed. This worked for me; your mileage may vary.

  1. Open Mail.app and visit your account preferences (CMD-,) and select the Mailbox Behaviors tab for your gmail account.
  2. Uncheck the field that says ‘Store notes in Inbox’
  3. Quit Mail.app. Don’t use the red Close button, but quit completely with CMD-Q.
  4. Go to gmail.com and delete the Apple Mail To Do label from the Settings Labels tab.
  5. Restart Mail.app and refresh gmail to notice that the pesky label is no longer there.

I hope that this helps other people that want to get rid of this pesky label as well. Enjoy.