This is how you easily find archived emails in gmail

When I switched from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail, one of the first questions I had was about finding my archived emails in Gmail, because I could not find a label called archived emails.

So I did a bit of research and found out some interesting things Gmail do with archived emails.

So How to find archived emails in gmail?

Archived emails disappear from your Gmail Inbox and stay forever in All Mails label until you manually delete them. These archived emails can be easily found under “All Mails” label in Gmail. You can also use Gmail filters to easily find specific archived emails.

To find your archived emails, first click How to Change Language on Google Chrome on “More” link in the left hand navigation of your Gmail as shown below (it works for both personal Gmail and Google Workspace subscription)

1. Click on more in Gmail

Here you will see a label called “All Mail”, click on it to see all your emails including the ones you archived.

2. Click on All Mail label to see all your archived emails

Use Gmail filter to find specific archived emails

Now you already know that you can go to All Mail label and find your archived emails there, but what if you want to find a specific email from someone that you archived?

You can use “in:all” filter which will show you all the emails including archived ones, You can also add more criteria to this filter to find specific archived emails.

For e.g If I want to find an archived email which was sent to me from Microsoft and had an attachment, I can use filter like

in:all from:microsoft.com has:attachment

It will show me all such emails as shown in the screenshot below.

5. Find specific archived emails with Gmail filter

How to find archived emails in Gmail on Android

To see archived emails on your Android device —> open your Gmail app —> click on the hamburger icon on top left, and then click on All Mail label.

Here you will see all archived emails as shown in the screenshot below.

Easily find Gmail archived emails on Android

Gmail Email Archiving Functionality

Email archiving functionality in Gmail is indeed very thoughtful work by Google, it would be helpful to understand how does gmail archive folder work so you can easily use it for your advantage.

I am sure you would like to keep your Gmail inbox as clean as possible, but we all get hundreds of email now a days, you can of course delete the emails that are of no value to you, but what about emails that are not relevant today, but might be in the future?

Thats where you can use Gmail’s email archiving functionality, as soon as you archive an email, it disappears from your Inbox and goes to All Mail label. It helps keeping our Inbox clean without losing or deleting the email that we might need in the future.

Delete vs Archive Emails – When should you use them?

To understand when should you archive vs delete emails, you should first understand the fundamental differences between them.

Feature

Delete Email

Archive Email

Default Behavior              When you delete an email in Gmail, it goes to your Trash label.  When you archive an email in Gmail, it essentially remove the inbox label from that email which makes it disappear from Inbox, and land in All Mail label.

Email Retention                Deleted Emails are retained in Trash label for 30 days, after 30 days they are deleted permanently and can not be recovered.